Twelve years after its inception, Nordkinn Asset Management is entering a new growth phase, expanding its investment team with the appointments of Arian Kalantari and Lars Mouland as portfolio managers. The duo will work alongside the firm’s three founding portfolio managers, led by Alexander Melsom, Head of Portfolio Risk Management. Adding further weight to the team, Paulus Ingram, best known in the hedge fund space as Head of Hedge Fund Investments at Dutch pension giant APG, has also come on board as Senior Advisor.
Once one of the Nordic hedge fund universe’s few €1 billion+ behemoths, Nordkinn’s fixed-income macro hedge fund saw assets come under pressure during the transition from the central-bank-dominated quantitative easing (QE) decade to the current quantitative tightening (QT) regime, where market pricing is decided by markets without central bank intervention. Now, with higher interest rates and renewed market volatility, the environment is extremely favorable for macro strategies. “It’s Christmas Eve for our strategy: macro is back and matters,” says CEO Erik Eidolf. “Markets are more volatile, and interest rates suddenly matter in a way they didn’t during our first ten years.”
“It’s Christmas Eve for our strategy: macro is back and matters.”
Erik Eidolf, CEO of Nordkinn Asset Management.
Eidolf emphasizes that Nordkinn has always been “highly process-driven, with a consensus approach to scaling the best ideas based on conviction levels and strict stop losses,” which he says has enabled the firm to deliver uncorrelated, asymmetric alpha. With Kalantari and Mouland on board, he sees the team even better equipped to capture opportunities. “The important additions of Arian and Lars to our investment team will further deepen our perspective on structuring trades to take advantage of playing G3 against two highly liquid markets, Norway and Sweden, with our local information and expertise edge.”
“The important additions of Arian and Lars to our investment team will further deepen our perspective on structuring trades to take advantage of playing G3 against two highly liquid markets, Norway and Sweden…”
Erik Eidolf, CEO of Nordkinn Asset Management.
Prior to joining Nordkinn, Kalantari was fixed income portfolio manager at Swedish pension fund AP1 and Swedish fund manager Öhman Fonder. Mouland spent more than 15 years as a fixed-income macro portfolio manager at KLP and Storebrand, before serving as Chief Rates Strategist at Nordea for the past seven years. Kalantari is based in Nordkinn’s Stockholm office, while Mouland works out of Oslo. “Running a multi-PM fund across two locations makes us unique in a Nordic context,” says Eidolf. “It’s very deliberate. We have an edge in both Norway and Sweden, and being present in these markets gives us a real advantage.”
Nordkinn will also benefit from the experience of Paulus Ingram, who has joined as Senior Advisor. Ingram previously served as Head of Hedge Fund Investments at APG in the Netherlands, Europe’s largest pension fund manager, where he oversaw a $23 billion hedge fund portfolio. “Paulus and I first met when I chaired the UN PRI Hedge Fund Working Group before founding Nordkinn in 2012, a role he later took over from me,” recalls Eidolf. “We both are strong believers that integrity, governance and discipline truly matter. He has been an informal advisor to me through some challenging times and I’m genuinely excited about having Paulus by our side as we embark on the opportunities ahead.”
“He [Paulus Ingram] has been an informal advisor to me through some challenging times and I’m genuinely excited about having Paulus by our side as we embark on the opportunities ahead.”
Erik Eidolf, CEO of Nordkinn Asset Management.
Launched in mid-2013, the Nordkinn Fixed Income Macro Fund spent most of its first decade navigating an unfavorable environment for macro investing. Despite central banks suppressing volatility, the strategy still delivered an annualized return of 3.8 percent in U.S. dollars between 2013 and 2021. Towards the end of 2021, surging inflation following the pandemic led to rate hikes globally, which meant the definitive end of the QE-era of zero or negative rates. At the transition to this new era of normalizing interest rates, Nordkinn implemented a series of improvements to its systems and risk management to adapt to the new regime, becoming more nimble in trade execution and better able to monitor risk in more dimensions. In USD terms, the fund gained 9.2 percent in 2023, and delivered a record 14.5 percent in 2024, underscoring its ability to capitalize on shifting market dynamics.
Eidolf believes the fund is now well-positioned to consistently generate uncorrelated alpha in these markets for its investors. “If we deliver that, growth in size will naturally follow. We run a very stable business, and we are not looking to grow for growth’s sake alone,” he concludes. “Instead, these three important additions of Arian, Lars and Paulus to our team simply build further on our commitment to generating uncorrelated alpha, and we are building the journey together with our investors.”
