Huttenlocher’s new hedge fund to launch on Dec 1

Carl Huttenlocher’s new hedge fund Myriad Opportunities Master Fund is to launch on December 1 with $300 million.

He founded Myriad Asset Management in Hong Kong after serving as senior portfolio manager for the Highbridge Asia Opportunities Fund.

The launch of this new fund was delayed while Hong Kong’s SFC investigated an anonymous complaint concerning the valuation of fund assets and the way unwinds were handled at Highbridge. That issue is now closed.

“It was a detailed complaint, but was completely baseless and fictitious,” says Huttenlocher, who is also ex-JP Morgan.

After a four-month interlude, his multi-strategy fund now proceeds with a team of 19, including 10 people on the investments team. There are six equity analysts, three sectoral specialists, covering technology, banks/real estate and commodities, and three with a geographical speciality, namely, China, India and Japan. There are two credit specialists, and the COO of the new firm is ex-Morgan Stanley executive Scott Gaynor.  

Myriad’s multi-strategy approach has an Asian theme and includes equity long/short, convertibles and capital structure arbitrage, event driven and credit.

Of those sub-strategies, Huttenlocher is immediately most optimistic on credit. “2012 could be a year for non-Japan credit much as 2009 proved to be," he says. "However at this point, overall we’d be market neutral, though at other times, when there are less uncertainties in the market, we would be more directional.”

The capacity for the new fund is $2 billion and if this level is reached by the end of the second quarter of 2012, it will be hard-closed.

Assisting Huttenlocher and Gaynor with fundraising is former Goldman Sachs executive Jonathan Summers. There are a number of share classes with differing lock-ups and fee terms. The longest is the founders’ share class, with a three- to four-year lock-up.

So why are the two top executives jumping back into the turbulent waters of hedge funds, having left the deluxe watering holes of JP Morgan/Morgan Stanley?

“I’ve started up an entrepreneurial venture before and really wanted to do it again,” says Huttenlocher.

“I get more satisfaction from being my own boss,” says Gaynor. “You can’t put a dollar sign on that.”