Man Group shakes off end of Trump Bump as funds jump
The bump from Trump is over, but hedge fund and quant expert Man Group is still buoyant.
Funds under management jumped 10% to nearly $89 billion (£70 billion) in the first quarter as investors ploughed into Man’s “long only” and fund of funds instruments.
Chief executive Luke Ellis has just closed his takeover of Aalto and says more deals could follow. He says he intends to be picky and won’t be short of opportunities.
Markets soared on Trump’s election but have stumbled lately.
Ellis said: “The Trump shake-up is over. The whole idea about Trump was that he was going to change a load of things, there’d be some big winners and some big losers. The world has gone back to business as usual.”
Man Group eschews index trackers, leaving that to Vanguard and BlackRock. Ellis said good active managers will in the end beat the index. “Trackers are a perfectly sensible thing to invest in but we want to be very active,” he said.
The “global environment” creates the potential for “alpha opportunities”, said Ellis. His quant funds — stock picking made by maths boffins — had a tough quarter. Three of the main quant funds in the AHL arm — Dimension, Alpha and Diversified — all recorded a loss in the three months.
Man Group shares jumped 8p, nearly 6%, to 148.8p as the City cheered the rising assets.
