ATP has set up a unit dedicated to non-traditional assets to identify opportunities currently overlooked by its peers, CIO Henrik Gade Jepsen has said.
The Special Situations unit, headed by Niels Christian Wedell-Wedellsborg, will invest in assets that do not sit neatly within the fund’s current investment structure and are therefore at risk of being overlooked – such as opportunities with a combination of equity and debt.
“We are very consciously looking at assets that may be hard to fit into traditional asset classes, as they will be the least sought after by the average investor,” Gade Jepsen told the current issue of IPE.
He added that the new unit would improve co-ordination between ATP’s subsidiaries, which manage its private equity, real estate and venture-capital holdings.
“Today, we have a much closer collaboration between the headquarters and the subsidiaries,” he said.
“It is more necessary now than it was 10 years ago when we created the structure because it’s much more difficult today to find good investments.”
The CIO also said he was reviewing ATP’s approach of placing assets in five risk classes, rather than more traditional asset buckets.
The system, in place since 2006, has seen the fund divide holdings into equity, inflation, credit, interest rates and commodity risk classes, but Gade Jepsen said he was unsure where a change in strategy could take the DKK641bn (€86bn) investor.
“I’m not scrapping anything before I know what the answer to the question is,” he said.
“We are keeping the five risk classes until we have something new. You need a simple anchor for your thinking in day-to-day life.”
No comments yet