Australia's superannuation industry has begun a love affair with 130/30 long-short equities funds. And it is not alone.
Entering 130/30 into an Internet news search yields literally hundreds of instances of pension funds across the world signing up these types of strategies in recent weeks.
Examples include Europe-based financial giant Blue Sky Group, which in April said it planned to shift its entire Eu4.2 billion passive global equity portfolio into 120/20 or 130/30 strategies.
The United States-based US$39.7 billion Teachers' Retirement System of the State of Illinois is another convert. It plans to allocate 10 per cent of its domestic equity portfolio to a 130/30 large-cap core strategy within the next two years.
In Australia, industry fund HESTA is one of many to sign up long-short managers this year. It has allocated 10 per cent of its total international equities strategic asset allocation to long-short managers.
Long-short 130/30 funds invest 70 per cent of the portfolio in long-only strategies and 30 per cent in short strategies. Because the manager sells 30 per cent of the portfolio short, an extra 30 per cent is available to spend on long stocks.
Hence the label 130/30.
HESTA's managers are all based in the US and comprise Acadian Asset Management, Axa Rosenberg and AQR Capital Management.
Acadian Asset Management is a specialist in 130/30 long-short funds and its chief executive Chris Clayton told Investor Weekly there was near insatiable demand for this type of strategy.
"We could have taken on a lot more money than we have already taken, but there are capacity constraints," Clayton said.
The firm closed its Australian equity long-short fund to institutional investors late last year and raised $500 million. Hostplus, Care Super, JUST Super and SPEC (Q) are all clients of Acadian.
Clayton said long-short strategies gave investors more opportunities than traditional long-only funds, but also urged caution.
"Many managers don't actually properly assess the stocks they want to sell short," he said.
"For managers that use a screening process it can become hard to differentiate between the good and bad stocks depending on the criteria they use."
Non-quantitative managers that embarked on long-short strategies could find it hard because they had to assess a whole lot more, he said. "Quant managers have historically done more research on what stocks to sell short and that is why they tend to be popular long-short managers," he said.
