UCITS investors seeking Event Driven strategies

In its latest survey on the growing market for Alternative UCITS, ML Capital observed Merger Arbitrage as the highest demanded strategy by the spectrum of Alternative UCITS investors, with 79 percent of all respondents planning to increase or maintain their exposure in the coming quarter.

ML Capital surveyed a diverse range of active Alternative UCITS investors, who collectively manage €50 billion and today invest upwards of €10 billion into Alternative UCITS products. Questions are aimed at discovering their forthcoming strategy allocations and are asked each quarter to the same respondents, in order to track asset flows between UCITS strategies.

Key highlights this quarter are as follows:

§ Merger Arbitrage strategies are likely to see significant inflows with 49% of respondents looking to allocate more to the asset class.

§ Big spike in demand for Market Neutral strategies, with one third of investors wanting to increase their allocations.

§ Drop in demand for most Equity Hedge strategies with the most dramatically affected being European and Global.

§ US long/short funds fare best of all Equities strategies, with almost 40% of respondents planning to raise their investments.

§ Japan is still struggling to attract attention with a lowly 7% of respondents planning to increase their allocations, the lowest level of any strategy in this quarters Barometer.

Commenting on the latest survey, John Lowry, Co-Founder and Chairman of ML Capital: “The most significant trend in this quarters Barometer appears to be a widening out of interest across several strategies with more te