Hedge Fund of the Decade: Shortlisted

Best Non-Directional Hedge Fund over 10 Years: Shortlisted

IKOS has been managing client assets from 1993 and was one of the first independent hedge funds in Europe.

Founder and chief executive officer Elena Ambrosiadou started the company with a reputed $600,000 in a managed account in 1992. Since when it has grown substantially, accruing assets under management to around $1.5 billion.

Originally headquartered in London, the company moved to Cyprus in November 2009. It operates a global infrastructure with execution sites and research facilities in New York, Tokyo, Vienna, London, Cyprus and Monaco and has over 70 professionals dedicated to investor service.

The IKOS Hedge Fund has been trading since August 1998. Listed on the Irish stock exchange, the fund is a multi-strategy product that is completely systematic and quantitative. It aims to derive a consistent and diversified source of return from global financial markets and combines global equities traded via a statistical arbitrage, market-neutral strategy combined with a managed futures book trading bonds, interest rates, equity indices, commodities, currencies and spot foreign exchange.

The fund is extremely liquid and aims to deliver above average risk-adjusted returns through all market cycles.

IKOS as a company has built a reputation for taking advantage of volatile markets and delivering returns in every environment. It does this by using its proprietary technology to capture alpha from trading in global financial markets with fund classes listed in the Irish Stock Exchange.

The company has been trading currencies for over 13 years. Its hedge fund approach to currency trading, coupled with an innovative, globally distributed execution platform and enhanced risk control systems, produce a persistent risk/return profile.

As well as using a completely automated and integrated approach to price forecasting, portfolio construction, risk management and execution, IKOS uses multiple models to exploit market inefficiencies across a range of timescales. The company takes full advantage of the low cost and transparent nature of electronic markets. This delivers the benefit of allowing very short-term cost and information sensitive trades to be executed efficiently in real time.

The first target for the IKOS strategy developed by Ambrosiadou and her husband, Martin Coward, a quant analyst who developed a quantitative investment platform while working for Goldman Sachs - was Japan, targeted as one of the world's largest and most inefficient stock markets. And over the years, the investment programs developed by IKOS have benefited investors through consistency of returns, asset protection and risk reduction.

In December 2009 Coward announced he would be leaving the company to set up a separate asset management operation "to recreate my vision of a research focused team" and to manage family money. He is working a 12-month notice period.

Fund facts: IKOS Hedge Fund

Full name of fund: The IKOS Hedge Fund
Name of investment/management company: IKOS
Contact information: Alexander Masotti, 1 Iacovou Tombazi Street, 201 Vashiotis Business Centre, Limassol 3107, Cyprus (+357 2581 4714; marketingoperations@ikos.com.cy)
Launch date: 1998
Strategy: statistical arbitrage, market neutral, global futures
Assets under management: $170.19 million (at April 30, 2010)
Annualised return: 11.71% (at March 31, 2010)
Annualised volatility: 8.68% (at March 31, 2010)
Sharpe ratio: 0.95
Share classes: US dollar
Administrator: Daiwa Europe Fund Managers
Auditor: KPMG
Custodian: Daiwa Securities Trust & Banking
Prime broker: NewEdge, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, UBS, Merrill Lynch
Domicile: Cayman Islands
Listing: Irish Stock Exchange
Management fee: 3%
Performance fee: 20% subject to high watermark
Minimum investment: $10 million
Lock-in: one year
Redemption notice period: 14 business days prior to end of month
Early redemption fees: 2% if before one year