In late November Frans van Schaik, formerly head of ABN Amro’s Dutch equity research effort, and two of the bank’s technology analysts received the go-ahead from the country’s central bank to launch their new Global Opportunities Fund. Now they’re starting to post their first real numbers.
In its first full month of operation, the fund chalked up a 2.6 percent return, compared with a loss of 8.1 percent for its main benchmark, the Morgan Stanley Capital International global index.
Van Schaik, 41, a top-ranked Institutional Investor All-Europe Research Team member from 1998 through 2000, opened Global Opportunities Capital with just $8.8 million, after about four months of fundraising. “Early on we discovered that finding investors would be difficult,” he says. “Most of the Dutch institutional investors we talked to were ready to invest in a hedge fund but wanted to see a track record first.” As a result, Global Opportunities has put its roughly $100 million fundraising goal on hold until later this year, while van Schaik and colleagues Corneille Couwenberg and Ron Belt focus on performance.
To raise money, Global Opportunities’ partners went, well, Dutch. Slightly less than half of their funding came from some friends of van Schaik’s at Optimix, an Amsterdam-based mutual fund group with E2.2 billion ($2.17 billion) under management. The remainder was cobbled together from the personal resources of business partners, friends and family members.
Global Opportunities is investing mostly in technology, media and telecommunications stocks and has the ability to go long or short. It got some early help in building a track record: The fund opened for business on December 4 with a net long position on the Nasdaq composite index, one day before it rose a record 10.5 percent.
