Mercer awards Invesco a hedge fund mandate

Mercer Global Investments (MGI) has changed the target allocations of its Diversified Alternatives fund with a new mandate comprising 10 per cent of the fund being given to the Invesco Multi-Strategy Fund.

The allocation is the first by an Australian investor and has effectively provided the seed capital for the Invesco offering.

MGI chief investment officer Russell Clarke said: “While the mandate is for the Diversified Alternatives Fund it will feed into the multi-sector funds that we offer so effectively this investment will be used through the wide bulk of our investors’ assets.”

The Invesco Multi-Strategy Fund is an absolute return product combining a US market neutral, European market neutral, global tactical asset allocation, and diversified fixed income strategies.

“We’re always on the lookout for good products, particularly in the alternatives space. It’s obviously hard to find good quality products with capacity available,” Clarke said.

“We’ve certainly been on the lookout for a while. We like the notion of a multi-strategy fund and we favour a single manager multi-strategy fund over fund of hedge funds, because there’s grater transparency, and the fees are more transparent and more reasonable. They are obviously factors that we like and this product was developed by Invesco — we did all of our due diligence on it and decided that we liked it,” he explained.

Clarke pointed out that no existing managers in the fund were let go because of the new Invesco allocation.

In regard to the 10 per cent allocation, he explained there was no “rocket science” involved and that the ratio arrived at was a result of trying to maintain a reasonable balance between the alpha strategy, beta strategy and structured components of the MGI Diversified Alternatives Fund.