Afalon Scales Up Amid COO Hire

Stockholm (HedgeNordic) – Finnish asset manager Afalon Investment Management, which runs systematic managed futures fund NS Quant, has hired Benjamin Strabo as its Chief Operating Officer (COO). Strabo joins Afalon from Finnish advisory firm Verona International, where he served as COO for one and a half years.

“Welcome to the Afalon Team, Benjamin Strabo! Ben will lead our multi-family service offering.”

“Welcome to the Afalon Team, Benjamin Strabo! Ben will lead our multi-family service offering,” Markku Malkamäki, Afalon’s chairman and CIO, writes on LinkedIn. Before joining Verona International in Helsinki at the beginning of 2020, Strabo was the COO of Harmony Advisors, a leading multi-family office servicing ultra-high-net-worth families in Hong Kong, for a little more than three years. From mid-2002 to mid-2009, he served as an executive director in the securities division at Goldman Sachs in London, and then was responsible for hedge fund and institutional cross‐asset sales as a Vice President at Goldman Sachs in Hong Kong for an additional seven years.

In connection with last year’s agreement by Finnish investment services group Privanet Group to acquire Northern Star Partners, the former fund management company of NS Quant, Markku Malkamäki’s Afalon Investment Management acquired the NS Quant business and the fund. NS Quant returned 9.5 percent in its first year of operations in 2020 and is down 5.1 percent in the first eight months of this year. Afalon Investment Management is also in the process of launching another hedge fund, the Incomea Steady Opportunities ESG Sustainable Long Short Fund, managed by Afalon’s CIO Jaakko Soini.

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