Q3-2020 Swiss-Asia Communication

10th November 2020

Q3-2020 Swiss-Asia Communication

Written by Steve Knabl, COO & Managing Partner

Reading time: a few minutes

With the summer months firmly behind us now, we have focused on making our business even more resilient to economic fluctuations and we will continue to build on the very positive momentum that has been established during these difficult pandemic months. I think that we human beings have again demonstrated that we can adapt to pretty much anything. When we get knocked down, we always seem to get up again and keep fighting. That is the survival spirit that all entrepreneurs have in common and love. 

Off the bat, I would like to highlight the awesome work of the Swiss-Asia Platform Global Macro Funds and CTA's in 2019 and 2020. It was surely a roller coaster ride, but they have managed to demonstrate once again superior skills and to navigate the heightened volatility and market turmoil. Even now that the elections in the USA are firmly behind us, the global pandemic situation will surely not give them any rest any time soon !

As a testament to the outstanding work, 4 of the Swiss-Asia Platform Global Macro & CTA Funds are Nominated for the 2020 Asian EurekaHedge Awards.

Also to highlight, Ashvin Murthy, CIO and Founder of the AVM Global Opportunities Fund recently featured an interview with Saxo Bank strategist Kay Van-Petersen. They talked about AVM’s journey and the outlook for markets. You can find highlights of the interview in the following link: https://avmglobal.fund/video-gallery/. 

SWISS-ASIA PLATFORM FUNDS PERFORMANCE SNAPSHOT

Q3 net performance was great for the Marco/CTA boys and some great numbers coming out of the Equity funds with Coprossa leading the pack on a YTD return basis. Q3 was also the second consecutive month where net inflows from allocators was positive and strong hitting a healthy 10% of our assets. Investors allocated new capital to hedge funds in Q3 as a result of both defensive outperformance through the coronavirus-driven volatility in early 2020, as well as opportunistic gains through the uneven financial market recovery in the second and third quarters.

FEATURED FUND

This quarter, we feature the TGCC M3 Momentum Fund - A systematic, trend-following, quantitative CTA. Tan Sze Meng - Founder, and Chua Kim Kian - Fund Manager, have been running their model since 2006 as a private Investment and decided to launch a Fund on the Swiss-Asia Platform in 2015. They have demonstrated superb resilience and skill during difficult markets in 2020. They have maintained a considerable lead this year by adding 10% in Q3.

For the background story on the Fund Managers; in 2004, Sze Meng joined his colleagues (Head of Risk, FM and Research analyst) to invest in Malaysia index futures but failed miserably. It had lost more than 90% in 10 months. Sze Meng then looked into the track record and found out that the investment even though had 60% success rate, but it win/loss ratio was 1:3. He engineered to reverse the whole investment strategy and came out with the current strategy. The strategy only has 30% success rate but with win/loss ratio of 4:1

With more than 20 years of experience in risk management and portfolio construction, TGCC focuses on 3 aspects: Risk management, Diversification and Portfolio construction. Around 50 futures markets are traded across 4 sectors; equity indices, fixed income, currencies and commodities. Position sizes are determined based on liquidity, market volatility and correlations with other markets. The models operate independently and portfolio is built “bottom-up” based on the signals in each model. Minimization of each investment’s loss is integrated in the design of the models and strict limits are imposed to position concentration and on total aggregated risk, thus limiting drawdowns. CTAs in general and TGCC in particular have historically performed well in volatile markets and during larger crises in equity markets, periods where risky assets and other funds struggled. Keep a close eye on these gentlemen to see how they close off the year. 

Please do reach out to us for more information on the Fund and the Managers.

MIDDLE AND BACKOFFICE OUTSOURCING

If you’re not yet familiar with Swiss-Asia, we are a Singapore-based Fully Licensed Financial Institution offering insourced and outsourced platform solutions. We offer high-touch, tailored services to Private Funds, Hedge Funds, and Investment Advisers (Wealth Managers). We like our clients to think of us as an extension of their staff. Outsourcing or insourcing non-investment functions to Swiss-Asia as an extension of their staff allows our clients to focus on their core business while keeping overheads low. This concept is becoming especially important in the world we are living in today. Our team has decades of experience managing the critical non-investment functions across the alternative and registered fund space. Our experience includes acting as, Chief Legal Officer, Chief Compliance Officers and Chief Operating Officers for all types of strategies ranging from non-conventional asset classes such as Crypto and Venture Capital in frontier markets to Equity, Derivatives strategies, Private Equity and solutions for Wealth Management teams and start-up Family Offices. This is merely an extension of our core Platform Services for Fund Managers that have their own Regulatory Licensing and require a robust and experienced Middle and Back office team without the hassle of having to manage the Human Resources and the risk associated to Operations. I will be writing a dedicated article on this topic very soon. Keep a look out for it.

As we enter the final stretch of the year, we have cautious positive outlook for 2021 and look forward to the turn of the year. Q4 will close off an unprecedented year with some positive and some negative takeaways on the back of the pandemic.

On behalf of the Swiss-Asia team, I would like to again thank all our Managers and support team for their dedication and hard work.

Steve