MontLake Advent Global Partners UCITS

Advent is a global investment firm founded in 1995 that specializes in credit, equity and derivative markets with assets under management of $8 billion and offices in NY and London. The firm runs three core businesses: long-only, closed end funds, and alternatives (about $500m). The UCITS fund launched in July 2016. The strategy applies a bottom-up multi-strategy approach that seeks to exploit relative value volatility, event driven and credit opportunities. In order to achieve its return target (LIBOR + 6%) the fund may allocate to multiple sub-strategies including convertible bond arbitrage (the firm’s DNA), volatility arbitrage, equity arbitrage, credit relative value, etc, with a catalyst-driven approach. The portfolio is US centric and is run with low leverage. The strategy experienced a challenging March 2020 (like other peers) with many of the core allocations coming under severe pressure amid the global onset of the COVID pandemic. Particularly, convertibles’ valuations cheapened at an unprecedented level/pace (greater versus the GFC) leading to mark-to-market losses at the portfolio level. These were marginally offset by the positive contribution of volatility strategies. Nevertheless, the manager took advantage of the severity of the market dislocation to initiate new positions as well as add to multiple existing positions (the highest quality ones), which are paying off in April. Overall, the manager believes that the current crisis has created one of the best opportunity set for the strategy in a decade (particularly across convertible and credit markets).