New funds
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In 2016 we launched our UCITS platform, Kepler Liquid Strategies, with the express aim of partnering with best-in-class managers to launch and distribute their UCITS strategies to our network of investors.
The platform has grown to five funds and despite a challenging 2020, assets under management continued to grow to reach a total of just over $1bn at the year end. During the year we have raised a gross total of $484m for clients. We successfully launched two new strategies in July raising just under $100m of external seed capital at launch; the KLS Ionic Relative Value Arbitrage Fund and the KLS Niederhoffer Smart Alpha UCITS Fund. Since then the KLS Ionic Relative Value Arbitrage Fund has attracted strong interest from investors, with AuM rising from $49m in July to $130m today. As a team, Kepler has now raised well over $3bn for its open ended fund clients. An unexpected but exciting development in 2020 saw us bring in-house a portfolio management team of four people led by Ed Butchart, former CIO at Sloane Robinson, to manage the KLS Emerging Markets Fund. |
Kepler Liquid Strategies AUM now stands at just over $1bn |
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New investors |
More than 150,000 investors visited our research websites in 2020 |
Investors' appetite for information surged as the scale of the Coronavirus crisis became apparent, and the consequences for our readership have been profound - with record numbers of visitors spending more time than ever consuming our research.
We saw more than 140,000 individual investors come to Kepler Trust Intelligence, our investment trust research website, during 2020 - a 30% increase on traffic over the previous year and double the number of readers we saw in 2018.With more than 90 investment trusts on our client roster, the investment companies team has grown to thirteen people, having added two new hires during 2020. Meanwhile, our work with a select group of investment trusts to target wealth managers directly with face to face meetings continues to expand, with two new clients added during the year, taking the roster to 19. As a team we conducted over 400 investor meetings online between March and December, helping our clients to stay close to their investors during the turmoil in markets. Five of our retained clients have either issued a new prospectus and continued to raise new capital throughout 2020 or were trading at a premium and issued shares from Treasury or via tap issuance. Our website for UCITS hedge fund research, Absolute Hedge, saw seven hundred new registrations in 2020 - joining the thousands of allocators, managers, and service providers who already access the site to view funds, understand trends in flows and performance, as well as accessing our proprietary research content. The team published 120 pieces of research over the year, covering a diverse range of topics from ESG & Alternative Strategies to Catastrophe Bonds. |
New ways to communicate
Faced with the obvious challenge that Covid-19 posed to hosting physical events, we successfully and swiftly pivoted into digital events for our UCITS and investment trust clients, which saw more than 2,000 investors join our sessions as the year evolved...
400 investor meetings | 15 major events | 120 speakers | +2500 delegates
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FOR UCITS INVESTORS
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FOR INVESTMENT TRUSTS
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We launched a monthly event series focussed on specific Alternative UCITS Strategies, alongside our flagship ‘Virtual Week’ series.
Since launch in March 2020 we saw 880 investors visit these events, each one able to engage with 95 funds (15% of the entire universe of funds). What was particularly noticeable was that alongside our core European audience the move into the virtual realm saw us register delegates from over 22 different countries around the globe. Looking forward, we plan to expand our physical events as and when this is practical, but will retain a virtual element to these events to facilitate global investor/manager introductions. |
Moving quickly to take our face to face meetings with wealth managers online, we also shifted to a digital agenda for our broader 'flagship' events for private and professional investors.
Between March and December, in addition to more than 400 online meetings between fund managers of investment trusts and wealth managers, we saw more than 1,500 delegates join twenty five different managers at four full day or multi-day events. Targeting private investors as well as professionals, our events programme continues in 2021 with our next virtual summit scheduled for March 2, 3 and 4 - aiming for an audience of 1,000 delegates as we consider the prospects for all of the worlds key regions, themes and asset classes. |
Talk to us...
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Hugh van Cutsem
Investment companies T: +44(0)20 3384 8796 E: hugh@keplerpartners.com |
Tom Trotter
UCITS sales T: +44(0)203 887 6913 E: tom@keplerpartners.com |
Georg Reutter
UCITS research T: +44(0)20 3384 8794 E: georg@keplerpartners.com |
