Ikos founder to open new fund to outside investors

Δημοσιεύθηκε: 3 Μαρτίου 2014 - 19:57

A mathematician who along with his Greek millionaire wife built one of Europe's largest computer-driven hedge funds before they split is to open his new fund to outside investors.

Martin Coward, who along with his ex-wife Elena Ambrosiadou built the Cyprus-based Ikos fund into $3bn of assets, will allow outside capital into his new venture, named Dormouse, at the start of March.

Malta-based Dormouse, which has been trading using Mr Coward's own money since the middle of 2011 using computer codes to trade automatically across global markets, hopes to raise about $300m in assets, which it plans to eventually scale up to $1bn.

Mr Coward co-founded Ikos with Ms Ambrosiadou in 1992 after meeting her at Cambridge university. The relationship broke down during the financial crisis and spiralled into a dispute involving more than 40 separate legal cases across Europe and allegations of corporate espionage.

Last year, Ms Ambrosiadou, one of Europe's wealthiest women, won a crucial case against Mr Coward after a court ruled that the secret trading codes used by Ikos were property of the hedge fund, not of her estranged husband who had claimed they were his property as he developed them.

Computer-driven strategies such as that of Dormouse and Ikos, which try to profit from identifying repeating patterns in markets, have struggled in recent years during volatile and unpredictable trading across many asset classes.

Dormouse, which will charge its investors a management fee of 1 per cent of their assets and 20 per cent of profits, rose 18 per cent in 2012, but fell 6 per cent last year.

Mr Coward said that he had been forced by trading conditions to adopt new ideas into the codes that he was using for Dormouse, and would also seek to start using the approach to trade in equities later this year.

"The last couple of years have been characterised by a very large correlation between asset classes, driven by quantitative easing and many models that have consistently performed in normal periods have lost money," said Mr Coward.

"We think there is going to at least be some reversion to what we had before, with correlations over the past five months starting to diminish".

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