Just months after reducing the capacity of Protean Select to SEK 1 billion, Protean Funds Scandinavia has reached the threshold and decided to suspend new subscriptions from the midpoint of the year, effective June 23. The decision reflects continued investor appetite for the boutique’s Nordic long/short equity strategy, both through the fund itself and via separately managed account mandates.
“The decision follows that the fund’s net asset value has exceeded the capital threshold of SEK 1 billion stated in the fund’s prospectus, in order to ensure an optimal management volume and to safeguard the interests of existing unit holders,” the boutique writes in a note to investors. Earlier this year, Protean Funds halved the fund’s capacity after attracting significant institutional capital through SMA structures. “We now manage institutional mandates alongside the fund, applying a similar investment strategy and investing in the same universe of companies,” co-founder and CEO Pontus Dackmo explained back in March.
“The quality and integrity of the investment process must take precedence.”
Pontus Dackmo
The addition of these parallel mandates has effectively reduced the overall capacity available for the strategy, which focuses on Nordic equities with a bias toward small- and mid-cap companies. “We can now spend more time on the actual job of managing money, not on marketing and due diligence processes,” said Dackmo. Dackmo and his team believe that “the quality and integrity of the investment process must take precedence.”
Launched in May 2022, Protean Select is an opportunistic long/short equity hedge fund maintaining a positive net exposure to Nordic equities, while retaining the flexibility to short both indices and individual securities when appropriate. The strategy is long-biased and sector-agnostic, while also seeking to capitalize on selective shorter-term opportunities when the risk/reward profile is compelling. The fund is built around a straightforward guiding principle: “generate reasonable returns, with reasonable risk, for an unreasonable long period of time.” Protean Select has delivered an annualized return of 8 percent since inception through the end of April this year.
