Ana Cukic Armstrong has revamped her fund management business after buying out other shareholders, following a split with her former husband.
Ms Cukic Armstrong previously ran Armstrong Iinvestment Managers with her husband, Patrick Armstrong, but the pair are now set to divorce and he has become chief investment officer at Plurimi Investment Managers.
She said she had refined the investment process by hiring more staff, including portfolio managers. She revealed the company’s process was 70 per cent quantitative, but 30 per cent qualitative – meaning human input.
“You cannot rely entirely on a quantitative process as it cannot anticipate things such as a change in economic policy, or something like the change in asset allocation in the Japanese sovereign wealth fund,” she said.
Ms Cukic Armstrong also said a new back-office system had been built in recent months, which was fully automated and analysed trades before they took place, thus providing improved compliance standards.
She said the system was akin to something large companies have but “boutiques usually don’t” and therefore was important when trying to attract institutionally minded clients.
The group has also this week hired Christopher Sullivan as direcotr and head of distribution.
Mr Sullivan will be responsible for establishing the sales team in Europe, Middle East and the US as well as helping the build out of the product range.
Elsewhere, the manager said the existing FP Distinction Diversified Real Return fund would be renamed Armstrong Global.
Mr Armstrong is taking the group’s other fund, the Diversified Dynamic Solution (DDS) fund, with him to Plurimi.
However, Ms Cukic Armstrong said she was in the process of launching a similar version of the fund, naming it the Opus DDS fund.
“I will be running it slightly differently as my way is more process-driven, more institutional,” she said.
The Opus fund will be a Qualifying Investor Fund and will be targeted at the institutional market.
Ms Cukic Armstrong said the fund was in the process of being seeded by a foreign bank and she hoped to have the fund launched by January.
Besides the two funds, she said she had moved to broaden the business’s appeal to wealth managers and family offices by offering bespoke portfolio management, as well as macroeconomic-based asset allocation models.
“We are targeting those clients where offering a fund is not sufficient,” she said.
“We have been approached by a number of wealth managers and large institutions, so we are expanding to offer something for those clients.”
Ms Cukic Armstrong said she had been doing this before but it had not previously been a strong focus of the business.
“The funds are still part of our offering, but to cover a wider market one has to go for customised solutions,” she said.
