Focus In the Eye of the Storm

"A lot of people define investors as value or growth. We are neither. We are time investors," says Hugh Hendry, the co-founder and CIO of Eclectica Asset Management. Hendry is aware that some in the investment community already think of him as something of a maverick, but is keen to assert his credentials as a fund manager prepared to adapt his strategies to meet the fast-changing opportunity set which global markets present.

It is no coincidence that Eclectica is planning to launch a long only agricultural futures fund later this year, and part of the founding team transferred from Odey in 2005, analyst George Lee, currently oversees its Agriculture Equities Fund. "We want to invest in the stocks which are relevant today," says Hendry. "We want to invest in stocks with relative momentum."

Hendry sees his Eclectica Fund, the flagship investment vehicle that he purchased out of Odey and which his firm is named after, as the ideas incubator for other funds, strategies and investment approaches. His aim is to provide a more thorough menu of investment products to clients in both the hedge fund and long only markets. He is sure that in a world where the rules of capital markets seem to be rewritten every month, it will take a firm with some fairly innovative approaches to investment to continue to attract capital.

The common thread running through all Eclectica's funds is Hendry's insistence that equity investments display strong relative performance. "All assets have the potential to go right or wrong relative to their peers before one makes or loses absolute money," he says. Hendry adds that "emerging bull markets are notoriously volatile and we don't want to be shaken out by the noise.