We use cookies to give you the best experience on our website. If you continue without changing your settings we’ll assume you are happy with this. You can find out more about how we use cookies and how to change your settings here.
 

Octopus blog

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 | 41 | 42 | 43

Important information

The ideas and conclusions within these blogs are the authors' own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Octopus. They are for general interest only and should not be taken as investment advice or as an invitation to purchase or sell any investment. For our full terms and conditions, please click here.

Absolute return team and strategies

David Crawford - 01 October 2010

Octopus' range of absolute return funds has grown over the last two years. Having started with the CF Octopus Absolute UK Equity fund, launched in 2008, which I run, we have since added the IM Octopus Absolute European Fund, run by Thierry Serero and assisted by Oliver Sherman, and the IM Octopus Alternative Strategies Fund (part of the multi manager Foundation Funds that make up Octopus Portfolio Manager), which is run by Colin Lunnon.

We're applying a range of strategies and drawing on an increased breadth and depth of skills and experience. The team all believe strongly in the value of absolute return strategies and through working together we've been able to strengthen and refine our approaches. Our starting thesis, that markets remain generally efficient most of the time but still throw up sufficient anomalies for fund managers to profit from, remains intact. We spend time working on understanding industries and companies in order to estimate what the market will value these businesses at in the future (referred to as the company's ‘intrinsic value'). Where there's a gap between the quoted price of the business, and its intrinsic value, we look to invest and eventually to profit from this gap closing.

In the majority of cases, we seek investment ideas where we believe the potential risk-reward is skewed far in investors' favour, and these will tend to become core holdings. For ideas with a more balanced risk-reward, we may take an initial long or short position to focus our minds in order to better understand the situation at hand, with the potential to later develop a high level of conviction (and therefore a large holding) once we have followed the stock for a reasonable period of time.

In the Octopus UK Absolute Return fund we dig around in areas where other people may not, and the simple premise is to take long positions in stocks where the market is overly pessimistic and short positions where the market is overly optimistic. We then continue to carry out independent value added research on our holdings and to find new potential high return investment ideas. Potential ideas are ruthlessly analysed by the team before investment to see why our thesis could be wrong. The end result is a small number of high conviction, high return ideas, hopefully with limited downside from our entry price.

As a team, we're focused on using absolute return strategies to work towards our aims for investors. We continue to look for market anomalies where we believe the risk-reward is skewed in investors' favour. We're always here to speak with investors, so if you have any questions, please just call 0800 316 2349.

Octopus Investments Ltd is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. Terms and Conditions of use. ©2013 Octopus Investments Ltd. All rights reserved.