Relative Return Fund

The members of the traditional fund, The Relative Return Fund (RRF) are to be grouped into small industry-specific teams managed by a Sector Head. By dividing Club members into industry-specific sectors groups each individual is encouraged to discover, develop and execute interesting investment ideas within these groups. Within the longer-term RRF these ideas are then presented to the membership at Investment Decision Rounds at the end of every academic term. A vote is taken at the end of the Investment Decision which then determines the allocation of capital between the individual sectors and specific stocks.

The RRF will continue to operate in the same way as in past years with several smaller amendments. We plan to reduce the size of individual sector teams in order to give our members more exposure and more responsibility and create opportunities to take initiative and develop new skills. Further, we plan to allow short-selling to the extent of 10-15% of the overall portfolio value. Finally, in cooperation with our Risk Management team sitting in the ARF, we would like to allow the RRF teams to hedge some of their exposure, e.g. by shorting commodities in order to have a market neutral position in a promising mining stock.

Absolute Return Fund

The members of the newly established Absolute Return Fund (ARF) are to be grouped into small single-strategy teams managed by a Team Leader. The ARF will be based on small single-strategy teams and product groups. We plan to interview prospective candidates for the ARF in order to ensure that we recruit only candidates with sufficient financial knowledge and market understanding – candidates who do not meet these expectations will be given an opportunity to join the RRF and work on improving their skills before applying for the ARF again. Further, a risk management and control system is currently being developed which will allow us to monitor the individual teams, their performance, investment positions, exposure to risk on a daily basis.

We aim to start with 2-3 teams (e.g. Global Macro, M&A Arbitrage), each consisting of 2-3 members. Depending on the interest within the wider student community, the quality of our prospective applicants and the success of our teams and risk management procedures, we would like to progressively introduce more teams and/or more strategies in the future.