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22 May 2015 - Pengana Absolute Return Asia Pacific Fund

By: Australian Fund Monitors
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Report Date20 May 2015
ManagerPengana Capital
Fund NamePengana Absolute Return Asia Pacific Fund
StrategyEquity Long/Short
Latest Return DateApril 2015
Latest Return3.87%
Latest 6 Months7.95%
Latest 12 Months11.89%
Latest 24 Months20.16%
Annualised Since Inception11.43%
Inception Date01 September 2010
FUM (millions)AU$85.8
Fund OverviewThe Pengana Absolute Return Asia Pacific Fund employs an event-driven investment strategy that seeks to exploit the mispricing of securities of companies involved in corporate transactions within the Asian (including Japan, Australia and New Zealand) region. Event driven strategies involve investing in opportunities created by significant transactional events, such as mergers and acquisitions, earnings surprises, capital management initiatives, capital structure arbitrage and index changes, among others. The Fund believes that significant corporate events can often create inefficiency in a company's share price which the Fund then seeks to exploit. The Fund aims to generate consistently positive returns which have a low correlation to the Asian stock markets. The objective is to generate 10-20% pa with a standard deviation of 6-10%.

The Fund will usually hold 40 to 80 positions and will be well diversified across the various event strategies. In keeping with the absolute return focus the Manager will eliminate market risk where appropriate by hedging market and foreign currency risks. Since inception the Fund has averaged a net equity market exposure of ~10%.

Sizing of an investment position will depend on the expected risk adjusted returns while taking account the liquidity and volatility of the stock. In addition, the maximum potential loss on any one position should be greater than 0.5% of the NAV and the position should not exceed 30% participation of stressed volume assuming a $200m NAV. Other criteria considered are ability to hedge and the availability of pair candidates as well as the average bid-ask size. For M&A strategies average long position is 3 to 5.5% and average short position 2 to 5%.
Manager CommentsPengana Absolute Return Asia Pacific Fund had a strong performance of 3.87% for the month of April, bringing the annualised return since inception to 11.43%. The Fund has achieved this performance with lower annual volatility of 5.78% (Asia Pacific Index 11.83%) , to bring the Sharpe and Sortino ratio to 1.32 and 3.37 respectively.

In comparison the HFR Event Driven Index closed +0.50%. The month saw significant volatility in China/ Hong Kong (H Shares) after CSRC allowed Chinese mutual funds to access Hong Kong markets which significantly impacted holding company discounts and A/H spreads. Performance was diversified across the M&A, Capital Management and Stubs sub strategies.

The Fund used this opportunity to reduce their gross exposure and overall net to 210% and 15.70% respectively. Forty percent of the Fund's monthly gross exposure by strategy was in M&A followed by Capital management at 24.80%. Whereas the country exposure as percentage (%) of NAV was most in Hong Kong/China with gross of 75.50% and Japan of 36.80%.

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