The Fund is designed to enable a growing number of investors seeking to access opportunities in both onshore (A-shares) and offshore (H-shares, Red-chips, P-chips, American Depositary Receipts [ADRs], etc.) Chinese equity markets without having the need to allocate to two separate strategies.

According to Tarek Issaoui, Head of Cross Asset Flexible Solutions at THEAM, coming months and years will most probably see more differentiation between the performance of flexible funds. As diversification benefits become less important, drawdown management will develop into a key element of underperformance or outperformance over the peer group.

This product, launched in 2012, uses a long-only investment strategy applied to a multi-asset universe, including equities, sovereign and corporate bonds (in both emerging and developed markets) and commodities through liquid instruments. Implementation of the strategy increases diversification by building exposures to traditional and alternative risk premia...

In fixed income, Malik Haddouk, Head of Balanced Management at CPR Asset Management and his team are focusing in the short term on exposure to long maturities (> 10 years), which are likely to get a boost from quantitative easing and weak inflation...

Performance drivers and risk factors are unstable parameters, at least in the short to mid-term. As a result, delivering returns over a relatively long horizon whilst avoiding transitory market shocks is no easy task for portfolio managers. While asset allocation is the main performance driver over long periods, it is also the hardest to achieve.