Our absolute return fund
Our Global Absolute Return Strategies Fund (GARS) aims to give investors positive investment returns in all market conditions. We seek to provide the same returns that have historically been achieved by conventional long-term equity investment, but with considerably less uncertainty.
The Fund has a cash benchmark* and targets an annualised return of 5% over the cash benchmark over rolling three-year periods, gross of fees. We expect this to be consistent with the long-term return available from equities and we aim to achieve this target with around a half to a third of the volatility.
It uses a truly active approach to diversified asset allocation, comprising a wide range of asset class exposures. Alongside dynamic allocations to traditional assets such as equities, fixed income and property, the GARS Fund uses advanced sources of market, relative-value and opportunistic returns. We select strategies freely across geographies and markets, investing where we find the best return prospects within robust risk constraints.
A success story
The GARS Fund has been a great success story. As at 1 Feb 2010, we had £2.4 billion under management in institutional and retail GARS portfolios.
Related resources
Training modulesThe information contained on these pages is for investment professionals only and must not be relied upon by anyone else. This Fund is not guaranteed, a capital protected product or a substitute for cash. The value of your investments can go down as well as up. In order to achieve its investment objectives the Fund will make extensive use of derivatives.
For full details of the fund's objective, policy, investment and borrowing powers and details of the risks investors need to be aware of please refer to the full prospectus.
As GARS uses derivatives to implement many strategies, breaking the Fund down by the percentage invested in each asset class doesn’t give a true reflection of its investment positions. Instead, we measure each strategy’s contribution to overall risk.
The first pie chart below shows you actual physical allocation. The second includes derivative exposure to give a more informed view of the different market strategies and the Fund’s diversified nature.
