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GAM Star Absolute EuroSystematic is a Ucits III-compliant vehicle, which can make both long and short investments throughout European stockmarkets, and is traded daily.

The fund will be Dublin-domiciled, and has already received approval from the Irish Financial Services Regulatory Authority.

GAM is awaiting the FSA's green light before the fund can be sold in the UK, and is expected to go live within the next two months.

The portfolio will typically comprise 100-150 long and 100-150 short positions, drawn from the team's quantitative screen, which whittles down the suitable stocks from a universe of roughly 3000 stocks with market capitalisations of more than €450m (£358m), according to value, earnings quality and momentum.

Mr Hollyman and his team of four UK and European specialists already run this strategy in the €20m EuroSystematic Value Hedge fund, which is an unregulated offshore vehicle.

Since the EuroSystematic fund's launch in October 2005 to 26 May 2008, Mr Hollyman has returned 39.4 per cent, according to Morningstar. This compares to the Hedge Long/Short Europe sector, which saw median returns of 34.68 per cent.

The new product is also similar to Mr Hollyman's long-only £252m Star European Systematic Value fund, which has returned 41.3 per cent since its launch in December 2004.

Mr Hollyman said his strategy would look to make the most of sentiment-driven mistakes.

"Exploitable investment opportunities arise because investors tend to extrapolate recent historic growth and return patterns too far into the future. However, powerful economic forces generate mean reversion, causing trends to end more rapidly than the consensus expects," he said.

"In order to identify these opportunities we have developed a distinctive, value-driven investment process based on quantitative techniques."

FUND FACT

Minimum investment: £6000