Africa ascendant? New fund aims to build a more peaceful continent
By Jon DavisA new hedge fund launched Monday, March 1, focuses on opportunities in Africa and promises to re-invest a share of its profits into African countries “wherever needed most.”
To underscore the seriousness of that vow, it was placed front and center in the lead sentence of GoldVest’s March 4 announcement that The Bullion Fund is open (though not the general public).
According to GoldVest, The Bullion Fund is an opportunistic global macro and long/short equity fund that uses “proprietary statistical trend following models for both new idea generation as well as hedging the overall portfolio.”
“The Bullion Fund helps give citizens of emerging nations the confidence to reinvest in their own economy by helping to open up their markets to free trade and encouraging foreign capital,” said Portfolio Manager and Managing Partner Steven Zoernack, formerly of Bear Stearns.
The fund, he added, “seeks assistance from [a]gencies both in the United States and in Africa in locating worthy goodwill projects to invest in. Some future projects will attempt to help maintain peace, improve global image, build schools, infrastructure, medical facilities, attract tourism, develop a financial center or assist in the cultivation and mining of natural resources.”
This isn’t Zoernack’s first venture in Africa. He is also executive director of the African Peace Fund, Ltd. – a non-U.S. alternative investment and goodwill fund managed by GlobalHedge, Inc. This offshore fund (based in the Cayman Islands), which is not open to U.S. investors, re-invests 25 percent of its profits back into African countries’ economies, “wherever needed most,” according to its website. (More, but dated, information about the African Peace Fund is here.)
Less than four months ago, Reuters’ Emerging Markets Correspondent Carolyn Cohn suggested the time might be right for investment in Africa, thanks to “rock bottom interest rates in the developed world.”
