The Tantallon Fund is a Cayman Island vehicle which invests in listed equities in the Asia Pacific region. The fund targets a concentrated portfolio of 35 names, with a 3-5 year investment horizon. At the portfolio manager’s discretion the fund may hedge its market and currency exposure, and short sell individual securities.
In the 10 years since the fund’s inception the un-hedged long book of the Tantallon Fund has returned an annualised +12.2% compound. The net return is a significantly more pedestrian +7.2%. While the ability to go short protected the fund somewhat in the latter half of 2008, our experience since then, in the face of persistent intervention by regulators and central banks, has been consistently bitter. In mid-2012 we concluded that shorting was detracting from our ability to travel and research companies and resolved to discontinue the practice. However we saw little upside in surrendering the option and we retain the flexibility to hedge. An investor’s equivalent of the Hippocratic Oath, First, Do No Harm, is a discipline we have attempted, with modest success, to apply when looking at either market or individual stocks on the short book since then.
(Click on each month's data below to read the monthly pdf report)
Against a backdrop of extreme volatility, the fund declined -2.8%, bringing the full year drawdown to -19.4%.
An utterly frustrating month to end a dismal year. We were flat on the month going into Christmas, principally due to gains in our currency positions, long JPY and short AUD, which contributed +2.03%. However, with Trump “goosing” the market on the prospect of a China deal and an apparent (?) moderation in the Fed’s communication, the surge in markets in the final days of the month helped our long book only modestly (-2.87%), but played havoc with our option positions and individual stock shorts, with unrealised gains of 2% evaporating and leaving us with losses of similar magnitude.
There is so little information on Iran you cannot even find the Teheran Stock Exchange on Bloomberg. Yet this is an exchange with a market cap of US170billion, turning over up to US150m/day with zero foreign participation, entirely on the back of domestic mutual fund and retail investors.
In Lv’iv on the morning of my departure I attended the funeral of one of the casualties of the “anti-terrorist operation” in Donetsk. Loudspeakers relayed polyphonic chant from impressively hirsute Orthodox clergy to a cluster of old women and an honor guard, smoking furiously and in no mood to be photographed, waiting to transport the hearse the short distance from the altar to a waiting ambulance.
Portcullis Trust (Singapore) Ltd
Morgan Stanley & Co. International plc /
PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP