Alternatives Watch - Altana Wealth scopes asymmetric payoffs with niche alpha wagers

By Hugh Leask

Altana Wealth manages a range of global investment strategies spanning credit, distressed, special situations, event-driven, carbon and cryptocurrencies. Established in 2010 by Lee Robinson, a co-founder of event-driven specialist hedge fund Trafalgar Asset Managers, Altana today manages close to $600 million in firm-wide assets, with offices in London and Monaco.

In a recent deep dive interview with Alternatives Watch, Robinson outlined a number of key trading ideas currently on Altana’s radar, and explained how higher-for-longer interest rates are strengthening opportunities within the firm’s investment universe amid growing macroeconomic uncertainty.

Neatly encapsulating the firm’s broader investment ethos, the Altana Asymmetric Opportunities Fund trades uncorrelated, asymmetric risk-reward opportunities in a range of markets – from Venezuelan sovereign bonds to debt restructurings in oil and gas names – with the aim of generating idiosyncratic alpha returns.

Other strategies include the Altana Credit Opportunities Fund, which invests in distressed sovereign debt opportunities; the Altana Event Driven Credit Fund, which targets double-digit returns from event-driven credit and special situations; and Altana Specialty Finance, a digital currency-focused alt-credit fund. The firm is also active in SPACs, Bitcoin and carbon credits trading.

Launched in April 2023, the Altana Asymmetric Opportunities Fund generated 8.28% during its first nine months, and then in 2024 – its first full year of trading – advanced almost 13%.

“Asymmetric Opportunities is our best ideas strategy, subject to their being able to make 4x return,” said Robinson, who before establishing Trafalgar had earlier helped build out the risk arbitrage business at hedge fund billionaire Paul Tudor Jones’s long-running Tudor Investment Corp. “Something that’s trading at 60 cents on the dollar, that we think is going to 90, would not fit into that fund. It can’t just be something that’s simply a good idea and is going to go up 30%. It’s got to be something that can make a multiple.”

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