KLS Athos Event Driven

Athos Capital was founded by Matthew Moskey (Principal and CIO) and Fred Schulte-Hillen (Principal & Portfolio Manager) in 2012, and today manages $1.2bn. The core investment team consists of 9 people across portfolio management, trading, and research functions. The strategy is focussed on a core opportunity set of short-duration, hard catalyst events (predominantly merger arbitrage) in the Asia Pacific region. This core allocation is then supplemented by global merger positions alongside a range of complementary arb/event driven strategies including Capital Markets (IPO's & Blocks), share class arbitrage etc. Analysis of potential deals is done in-house using proprietary models (financial analysis, comparable company analysis, etc). Each event situation is modelled independently and is then compared against the global investment universe via a real-time weighted average annual spread to determine one situation’s attractiveness relative to another. Once in the book positions are actively traded, with the same situation potentially traded multiple times in order to maximise returns and minimise risk, allowing the team to benefit from the inherent volatility in Asian equities to enhance the return stream. Risk management is a core trading discipline and is central to generating returns and preserving capital for the fund. Portfolio diversification provides the first line of defence. This is driven by the structurally differentiated opportunity set that exists within the Asian region e.g. China vs. Japan (arising from differing political, cultural, regulatory and governance norms) which often implies that merger arb spreads tend to be less correlated to each other compared to the European and US market. As a result, Athos prefer to use single stock shorts to isolate the specific alpha-generating event rather than macro hedges (e.g. futures options, etc). Positions are sized based on a maximum loss per position of 4% of NAV which has never been breached.