BENCHMARK’S core services
Benchmark Invest (BInvest) was formed in 2009 and currently operates in a master-feeder structure for IGLI’s assets. The three feeders are Benchmark Invest S.à.r.l., Benchmark Invest Compartment S.à.r.l. and Benchmark Invest Endowment Management S.à.r.l.
The General Partner of the Master Fund SICAV-RAIF is Benchmark Invest Advisors S.A. (“the GP”). The investment manager to Benchmark Invest Compartment S.à.r.l. and Benchmark Invest Endowment Management S.à.r.l. is Benchmark Invest S.à.r.l. The investment manager and the GP are owned and controlled by IGLI. The Master Fund, via its related feeders, is the main vehicle of the BInvest family.
Approximately 1,300 staff are employed by BInvest and its affiliates. The companies operate under the laws of Luxembourg and the Netherlands.
BI pursues a multi-strategy approach to investing, exploiting market inefficiencies and engaging in financial arbitrage. The company’s aim is to achieve absolute returns with minimal risk for IGLI, rather than outperform a given benchmark or asset class. BI’s four primary strategies are:
BI’s teams perform fundamental research on companies both as generalists and as specialists within a particular sector or sub-sector.
BI’s teams pursue a variety of systematic and fundamental arbitrage strategies across different parts of a firm’s capital structure and a variety of derivatives, such as merger arbitrage, event-driven strategies, convertible arbitrage, option-volatility trading, and others.
BI’s teams manage a number of different strategies including rates, macro, credit, mortgages and asset-backed securities, and commodities.
INVESTMENT STRATEGY
To meet its objective effectively, BI’s domestic and international funds pool their assets in a single master fund to allocate capital across a diverse set of strategies and asset classes in seeking the optimal mix of risk and return. BI’s global investment strategies include: relative value, fundamental equity, statistical arbitrage/quantitative strategies, fixed income and merger arbitrage/event driven. BI’s structure allows the funds to benefit from a level of flexibility and efficiency important in today’s dynamic markets.
BI’s mission is to deliver the alternative investment industry’s highest quality returns to its main investor, and to maintain a commitment to its principles of integrity, discipline and excellence.
BI empowers itstrading teams to independently focus on the specific opportunities and strategies in which they specialize, subject to its overall risk management, compliance, operational controls, and hedging of aggregate exposures where appropriate.
BI’s approach to the selection and oversight of trading teams is grounded in a philosophy of consistently seeking to generate incremental, positive returns against a limited amount of risk exposure (i.e., high Sharpe ratio), rather than outsized, but more volatile absolute returns.
BI prefers trading teams that produce small gains on winning days and smaller losses on losing days. Its goal is to have more winning days than losing ones. BI encourages its trading teams to pass on opportunities for outsized gains if they are accompanied by the risk of large losses.
In an effort to ensure that this philosophy is implemented in a consistent, disciplined manner, BI calculates and sets investment guidelines with each trading team.
BI employs a global multi-strategy investment approach, opportunistically engaging in a broad array of trading and investing strategies across a wide group of diversified managers.