| Matthew Li |
Matthew Li’s Fore Research & Management is preparing to raise outside capital for a new hedge fund that focuses on shorting the debt of European sovereigns and financial companies.
The new fund, which began trading at the end of January, is carved out of an existing strategy that the firm has already been investing in as part of its flagship multistrategy fund. That strategy produced an 86% gross return within the Fore Multi Strategy Fund last year, while the multistrategy fund produced a net return of 13.4%.
Li, Fore’s founder and portfolio manager, will be responsible for the new Fore European Credit Dislocation Fund. The fund, which was seeded with about $15 million of internal capital, will open to outside investors for two months starting in April.
The firm plans to manage the investment theme for only a short time and is aiming to wind down the new fund in June 2013, which will coincide with the expiration of the European Financial Stability Facility, the sovereign bailout fund created by the euro area member states in 2010 to prop up unstable European nations.
Li founded the firm in early 2003 after separating from Toronto-Dominion Securities, where he managed the global convertible bond proprietary trading desk.
Fore’s assets peaked at $2.6 billion in the middle of 2008, according to AR’s Billion Dollar Club survey, before falling to $1.3 billion in the summer of 2009. That same summer the firm consolidated its flagship Fore Convertible fund with its multistrategy fund. Fore Multistrategy has produced a net annualized return of 15.7% since its April 2004 inception. New York’s Fore now manages $1.8 billion in assets.
