Altaica Sustainable Equity Long Short

The year 2021 started enthusiastic. In the first week of January we gained about 5%. In the second half the Reddit actions in especially GameStop influenced the markets significantly. Due to heavy losses on short positions, some very large and established hedge funds needs to make cash by selling their long positions. This violence drove markets down, especially the formerly best performing parts of the markets. Fundamentally this is offering excellent entrance possibilities to stocks which were earlier overpriced and overbought. We ended the month with a small positive result. By this we outperformed our benchmark by a small margin.   The madness in GameStop proved our strategy choice to do not short any individual share. The tail risk of…

The fund performed excellent during August with a gain of 7.86%. By this we extended our outperformance by 2.51% up to 42.7% since start on the first of March 2019. Especially our stock selection contributed to the result. There were two stellar performing stocks, Varta (+37.64%) and Salesforce.com (+38.03%). Only a couple of stock ended up with a small negative return. Our portfolio hedge contributed as expected in a negative way to the result. However due to active management we managed we kept the impact relatively small. During August we repositioned the portfolio. Firstly we sold three underperforming stocks and sold part of the profits on Varta and Salseforce.com. We added five new positions and increased the stakes in some…

During December 2019 the fund was able to gain 1.64%, bringing the Start To Date performance above the 25%. The combination of a portfolio with a high positive ESG rating and best of class performance (Morningstar) makes Altaica Sustainable Equity Long Short Fund a proposition that is different than the mainstream offerings. We started the month carefully without any leverage. During the month the sentiment turned and it gave us the courage to gear up to a leverage level of almost 60%. The portfolio is still hedged. The best performing shares belonged mainly to the IT sector. Especially Adobe (+7.8%) and Cisco (7.3%) delivered a strong performance. On the losing side we found shares like Assa Abloy (-2.4%) and Walt…

The portfolio performed strongly during November 2019. With a gain of 5.6% it outperformed our long only benchmark by more than 2.4%. This brings us to a total performance of 25.95% since start in March 2019. Our outperformance of the long only benchmark is now up to about 14.5%. The outperformance related to the Long Short Equity Benchmark is more siginificant. At the very end of the month we reduced our leverage factor to zero. The strong positive performance over the last months is making us a bit more careful at the end of the year. The portfolio is still 100% long but also fully hedged by put options on the AEX Index against a market drop of around more…

During October the fund was able to deliver a positive return. However we were not able to catch up with the VanEck Vectors Sustainable World Equal Weight ETF. Due to some sector rotation in the markets and the expenses of our portfolio hedge the fund had a small underperformance. We added the iShares S&P Global Clean Energy ETF to the portfolio due to two reasons. First of all, to improve the diversification of the portfolio; according to the fund’s nature the fund has an underweighted position in the energy sector. We avoid the polluting carbon energy sector. By adding the Clean Energy ETF we compensate this underweighting. Secondly, we like to increase the impact factor of the fund. Not only…

During September the portfolio added a solid 1.8% performance to the result since the start of the Altaica Sustainable Equity Long Short Fund, bringing it up to 18.2%. During September we stayed invested while hedging the portfolio by buying put options on the AEX Index. The Put Option position returned negative due to rising equity markets. This tempered the overall performance of the portfolio. Because of this the portfolio underperformed compared to the Think Sustainable World ETF. However, since the start on the 1 March 2019 the outperformance relative to this ETF is about 11.5%. We remain confident regarding our positioning with solid downside protection given the combination of (very) positive equity sentiment and the fact that some important issues…

A solid performance for the strategy during a volatile month. The fund gained 2.3% which resulted in additional alpha generation. Compared to the Think Sustainable World ETF the outperformance since the start is around 13%. Main contributor to the performance and alpha is the equity hedge position at the start of the month. We added a significant position of AEX Put options to the portfolio at the end of the previous month. This AEX Put option position was closed near the bottom of the markets. The main contributors to the result in the portfolio are: Lowe’s (+12.1%), Pepsico (+8.1%) and Home Depot (+7.8%). The biggest drag to the result came from: Cisco (-12.6%), Assa Abloy (-8.5%) and Union Pacific (-8%)….

During July we performed in line with the global Sustainable Equity benchmark. We got some headwind by the losses on our derivatives bought end of June and start of July. After a fabulous June performance we decided to take some protection in the portfolio in case market sentiment would change in a negative way. As the markets performed in a positive way our derivates ended up with a 10% loss. A second drag on the performance came from Illumina. Illumina indicated softer than expected preliminary second-quarter results uDespite the lowered growth outlook for the remainder of the year, the demand prospects remain favourable for the foreseeable future. Also Svenska Handelsbanken lost 6,5% over July due to weak numbers. Not all went south,…

At the end of May we reduced the leverage of the portfolio from 165% back to 139%, this due to the increasing volatility and market risks. However at the start of June markets took again a U-turn move back to the positive sentiment of early 2019. In this way we were able to regain the losses made in May 2019. Moreover we were able to increase our outperformance to almost 9% compared to the Think Sustainable World ETF since inception, meaning for a period of the last 4 months. In the portfolio we added again the Think Sustainable World ETF and the iShares MSCI World SRI ETF. Especially the individual stock selection contributed significantly to the June 2019 performance. We are…

The markets made a downturn during May 2019, this after two positive months. The president of the USA, Mr Trump was the cause of the misery. He reignited the tensions of the trade war with China and reopened the trade war with Mexico. This in combination with the blacklisting of Huawei, real war tensions with Iran and a more gloomy scenario for BREXIT took away the positive market sentiment. The fund lost 8.10% of its value. This is a 3% more as the Think Sustainability World UCITS ETF, mainly caused by the leverage that we use. At the end of the month we brought down the leverage from about 64.5% to 38.6%. In summary, since the start of the fund…