Stockholm (HedgeNordic) – After strengthening its client focus with a new hire in August, Copenhagen-based asset manager Qblue Balanced has now reinforced its already experienced investment team with the hiring of Esben Hedegaard. Hedegaard joined Qblue Balanced as a Senior Portfolio Manager at the beginning of September after five years at AQR Capital Management.
“We are happy to announce that Esben Hedegaard has joined Qblue Balanced as Senior Portfolio Manager as of 1 September 2020,” writes Qblue Balanced in an announcement. Hedegaard spent close to six years at AQR Capital Management as a researcher, where he worked on the commodities research team and the portfolio construction team. He started his career at Danske Bank as an analyst quantitative research before earning a PhD in Finance at New York University’s Stern School of Business.
The new hire aligns with Qblue Balanced’s vision of becoming a “global leader that defines the industry standards in the field of systematic investments.” Qblue Balanced was founded by Bjarne Graven Larsen (pictured), 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. The Copenhagen-based asset manager launched a market-neutral alternative risk premia fund – Qblue Luxembourg – in July last year.
Qblue Luxembourg uses a market-neutral approach to harvest alternative risk premia across four main asset classes using a range of different strategies. “The Qblue alternative risk premia product has been constructed with the purpose of offering investors a new building block that truly diversifies the portfolio and at the same time performs independent of whether equity markets are up or down,” Larsen wrote last year in connection with the launch of the fund.
“By carefully selecting the risk premia we include, and by using modern and innovative portfolio construction techniques, diligently taking tail risk and drawdown 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,” Fredrik Martinsson, Co-founder and CIO at Qblue, said last year.
