SLI launches GARS spin-off Global Focused Strategies fund

Standard Life Investments has soft-launched a more aggressive version of its £20bn Global Absolute Return Strategies (GARS) fund and will roll it out widely in the next few months.

The SLI Global Focused Strategies (GFS) fund, managed by David Sol and Neil Richardson, will take more punchy equity bets, shorting individual stocks for the first time. The existing GARS fund uses a mixture of strategies, including traditional equity and bond investing, directional strategies involving currency and interest rate pairs, and relative value strategies to generate returns; for example, shorting French stocks and going long German stocks. It is the latter strategy GFS will modify to target an additional 2.5 percentage points of annual returns, by taking a stock-specific, ...