Meet the Manager by WSP

Nordea 1 – Alpha 15 MA Fund

25th February 2021

Guest

Nicolas Magnac-Dajean, Senior Product Specialist, Nordea Multi Asset Team

About the fund

It is a great time to consider a market neutral multi-strategy risk premia when valuations are stretched across the main asset classes.

The strategy offers a liquid solution that gives access to alternative strategies such as long/short, relative value, trend following and mean reversion.  The fund is a multi-strategy, risk premia based on liquid solution managed in-house, which uses several low and negatively correlated strategies consisting of equities, fixed income, and currencies.

Over time, the fund is aiming to build a largely market neutral portfolio through pair trades and/or long/short positions across the different investable asset classes. The fund aims to generate a return of cash + 7%-9% p.a. over a full cycle with a volatility between 10%-15% p.a. on average.

The fund is managed by one of the most experienced investment teams in the risk premia universe. A team that has identified, developed, tested, and improved a highly diversified set of risk premia strategies since 2004. They currently manage more than EUR 100 billion across different strategies.

The process is mainly a quantitative process, with a qualitative reality check to confirm that the current economic, market or political environment does not invalidate their models.

The fund has been launched in May 2019 but based on composite performance (since 2011), the return is comfortably beating its investment objectives, delivering 9,7% annualized return in EUR with 9,7% of volatility. Moreover, in 2020 the fund outperformed its objective but more importantly has shown what we expect from a market neutral multi-asset strategy: reactivity by switching into a risk-off mood in February and back into a risk-on stance in April and low correlation to markets. In March 2020 for instance the Nordea 15 offered strong returns and diversification (+5.0%).