Interview with Dr Ewan Kirk, CIO of Cantab Capital Partners LLP
Eurekahedge
November 2009
Cantab Capital Partners (CCP) is a systematic global macro hedge fund that manages assets in excess of $800 million. The firm is based in Cambridge, UK and it has close ties to the University of Cambridge. Founded in 2006, CCP is a team of 21 mathematicians, computer scientists and finance professionals. The firm’s success can be attributed to the high-quality team, robust models and institutional quality systems and software.
Over the last two years, the performance of the CCP Quantitative Fund has been contrary to the rest of the market. The fund posted impressive figures in 2008, while in YTD 2009, it has been in the red. Could you shed some light on these notable trends?
It is certainly true that the CCP Quantitative Fund has underperformed the equity markets in 2009. Since we are absolute return managers rather than equity managers, there is no reason to believe that we should outperform the equity markets every year. We are, by design and delivery, uncorrelated to the equity markets and that means that there will certainly be years where we are down when the equity markets are up. Of course, the negative returns this year should be put in context. Since our inception, we have returned more than 50%, whereas over the same period, the equity markets have lost 26%.
