CQS hires marketer in Hong Kong

Mar 9, 2010

The London-based multi-strategy hedge fund has appointed Nyree Hu to its relationship-management team, after losing its Hong Kong risk manager.

UK hedge fund CQS Management has continued its Asian expansion with the hire of Nyree Hu as a relationship manager to its investor relations team in Hong Kong.

Hu was previously marketing director for Asia at Ecofin, a utilities specialist investment management firm and, before that, a director at UBS Wealth Management in London. She will report to Brian Pohli, a director at CQS in Hong Kong.

The $6.6 billion fund manager recently lost its Hong Kong risk manager, Michael Schulz, who has joined Renaissance Capital in Moscow as their chief risk officer. Schulz arrived at CQS from Lehman Brothers in the first half of 2008. CQS has not yet named a replacement.

Despite this setback, Michael Hintze, chief executive and senior investment officer of CQS, remains upbeat.

"It is an incredibly interesting time to invest, and there are many idiosyncratic opportunities," he says. "There are strong cross-currents in the markets resulting from the major themes we see today, such as banking regulation, sovereign financing and solvency, balance-sheet repair and the diminished investor appetite for complex securities."

Hintze doesn't just sit on a yacht and enjoy the fruits of his industry. He shows up on the factory floor each day, because he is the portfolio manager for the multi-strategy CQS Directional Opportunities Fund.

In 2009, the fund he manages was the best performing of CQS's funds, gaining 56.3%, so he's obviously still got plenty of mojo. Indeed, all the CQS funds did well in 2009, including the ABS Fund (28.5%), Asia Fund (31.07%), CQS Fund 31.2% and the Diversified Fund -- a fund of other CQS funds -- which was up 25%.