New Industry Player to Launch ARP Fund

Stockholm (HedgeNordic) – Qblue Capital, a Copenhagen-based systematic asset manager founded in October of last year, plans to launch a multi-strategy risk premia fund within the next couple of months. The fund will aim to harvest alternative risk premia across equities, fixed income securities, commodities, and currencies using a systematic approach.

Qblue Capital was founded by Bjarne Graven Larsen, former chief investment officer at Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan and Danish pension fund ATP, along with a six-member team mostly comprised of former investment professionals from ATP. Among the co-founders are ATP’s former CIO of investments, Fredrik Martinsson, ATP’s former senior portfolio managers Martin Richter, Thomas Stryger Olsen, Lars Voss Toft, and Lars Hougaard Nielsen, as well as a former portfolio manager at Kiski Europe, Kevin Mitchell.

The fund, named Qblue Luxemburg, will use a market-neutral approach to harvest alternative risk premia in four main asset classes using 12 different strategies. Qblue Capital’s first product is expected to be marketed and sold to institutional investors across the globe after the summer bank holiday.

“Based on our collective experience, we want to help institutional investors achieve their objectives by developing and delivering robust and sustainable investment solutions with superior risk-adjusted returns at an attractive price,” CEO and founder Bjarne Graven Larsen said earlier this year. “It is our aspiration to become a global leader that defines the industry in the field of systematic investments.”

Qblue Capital’s multi-strategy alternative risk premia fund aims to represent a new building block for portfolio diversification among institutional investors. “A lot of investors find that equity risk accounts for around 80-90 percent of their total risk, even after diversification into credit and illiquid alternatives, making them vulnerable to equity market declines,” said Fredrik Martinsson, co-founder and CIO of Qblue Capital.

“By carefully selecting the risk premia we include, and by using modern and innovative portfolio construction techniques, diligently taking tail risk and draw down analysis into account, we believe that investors, by including the alternative risk premia building block, achieve a more robust portfolio with higher expected returns without increasing the total risk level.”