Stockholm (HedgeNordic) – There was little space to hide for those active on financial markets last year. As the dust settles on 2022, it was an all-around brutal year for fund investors. Trillions of dollars were wiped off world stocks and bond markets amid whipsawing currencies and commodities. 2022 has been perhaps one of the most turbulent years experienced by a generation of traders and investors.

Hedge funds, too, broadly speaking, found themselves in a tough environment, though pale in comparison with the pure-beta players. The Nordic hedge fund space also could not evacuate from the global tides. While it may seem there was little area one could escape to, there were many bright spots in the Nordic hedge fund industry last year.

It is worth taking a closer look and breaking down the universe into more digestible fractions to get a better picture of how the Nordic hedge fund industry performed in 2022. The heterogeneous language of an index, even a sub-index, does not tell the full story. One-third of the universe, after all, ended 2022 in positive territory. Eugeniu Guzun, therefore, takes a good look under the stuttering engine in his dissection of the Nordic hedge fund space.

This year’s “Nordic Hedge Fund Industry Report” also features allocator views on the role of hedge funds in institutional portfolios, introduces new launches, and highlights many bright spots in the Nordic hedge fund industry. In “The Hedge Fund Cure for Apoteket’s Pension Fund,” CIO Gustav Karner explains how Apotekets pensionsstiftelse, the pension foundation managing the €1.16 billion pension assets of Swedish pharmaceutical retailer Apoteket, managed to come out of 2022 unscathed and book a positive return of 1 percent.

The team at Antiloop Hedge led by Anna Svahn tell the story of “How a Multi-Strategy Hedge Fund Can be Labeled as Article 8” by relying on data platform for sustainable finance, Datia. Kari Vatanen, who wasn’t a big fan of hedge funds when he joined Veritas as chief investment officer in March 2020, says different hedge funds have different roles in a portfolio and you should “Know Your Hedge Fund Investment.” The hedge fund portfolio of Veritas returned an impressive 12.3 percent in 2022.

In “Sissener Canopus UCITS Celebrates 11 Years,” Jan Petter Sissener and Philippe Sissener describe how 2022 proved to be the best ever year for the single stock shorts, which were up 7.9 percent to account for most of the fund’s total return of 8.5 percent in 2022. Thomas Pohjanen’s and his team’s “Skills Honed and Perfected in and by the Markets” helped Excalibur Fixed Income enjoy some of its best streaks of performance in the past three years and the beginning of 2023.

Developed in a multi-team effort and spearheaded by the seasoned Chief Portfolio Manager Markku Vartiainen, a recently-launched hedge fund by Danske Bank Asset Management is “Answering the Million Dollar Question in Alternative Risk Premia.” The fund focused on capturing ‘true’ alternative risk premia successfully passed the initial proof of concept test in the difficult market conditions of 2022. Pontus Dackmo and Carl Gustafsson have put their “Skin in the Game” to launch Protean Select, a flexible and opportunistic long-biased equity fund “optimized for performance” that successfully navigated markets since its launch in the first half of 2022.

Carsten Bach, CIO of Danish fixed-income boutique CABA Capital, tells “CABA’s Journey in Scandinavian Bullet Bonds in a Three-Year Wrapper.” CABA Flex seeks to capture an opportunity set with long positions in Scandinavian bullet bonds and short positions in swaps and government bonds to hedge interest rate risk, with these positions designed to be held for three years, after which the fund is liquidated and the money returned to investors.

Activist investor “Accendo Celebrates 15 Years of Active Ownership” and joins the select group – now 33 – of long-running Nordic hedge funds with a lifespan that exceeds 15 years. Founder Henri Österlund hopes “the next 15 years will be a continuation of the first 15 years.” Susanna Urdmark and Henrik Rhenman explain their cautious stance on markets and discuss the combination of “Defensive and Opportunistic Growth Attributes” in healthcare.

In “Hedge Funds Find Their Place in Finnish Institutional Portfolios,” Kari Vatanen, from Veritas, Mika Jaatinen from Elo and Markus Frosterus from Keva discuss why allocations to hedge funds have increased among Finnish pension funds, if hedge funds still have a role to play in institutional portfolios and why Finnish investors have a preference for international managers.

Please find the report here. Happy reading!