New York/London: Brevan Howard Asset Management is planning a new macroeconomic hedge fund to be run by portfolio manager Alfredo Saitta, according to people familiar with the matter.

Saitta, who ran a portion of Brevan’s main fund, will manage the new money pool alongside two analysts, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the information isn’t public. The AS Macro Fund is expected to start in the fourth quarter, one of the people said.

A spokesman for the firm, which seeks to profit from broad economic trends by trading across asset classes, declined to comment on the plans.

Saitta is based in Geneva and joined billionaire Alan Howard’s firm in 2011 as a portfolio manager trading under the master fund. His portion of the investments produced annualised gains of 12 per cent, one of the people said.

That makes the former JPMorgan Chase & Co. trader one of the few macro fund managers to be making money as central banks’ market intervention damps the volatility that investors exploit for profit.

Among the other winners is hedge-fund manager Guillaume Fonkenell, who’s returning profits to investors after his $5 billion (Dh18.36 billion) Pharo Macro Fund gained about 12 per cent in the first half. And Glen Point Capital, whose clients include George Soros, is said to have surged about 17 per cent in the first six months of this year.

New funds

This is Brevan’s third recent move to back new funds. Howard is creating one that will be overseen solely by him and will manage money from the flagship fund as well as outside capital. And Brevan trader Giles Coppel is starting his own hedge fund with money from the firm, said one of the people.

The news comes after Brevan’s main hedge fund suffered its worst first-half loss ever and as it struggles to keep client money. The Brevan Howard Master Fund slumped 5.2 per cent this year through June and fell 1.5 per cent last month — its fourth consecutive month of losses. The fund saw assets plunge to $8.2 billion as of May from almost $28 billion in 2013, Bloomberg News reported previously.

Macro hedge funds have had a rough go lately, failing to perform amid investor expectations that more dispersion in global interest rates would provide trading opportunities and boost returns. Funds in the category were essentially flat on an asset-weighted basis in the first half of the year, making it the worst-performing of the main strategies tracked by Hedge Fund Research Inc. Last year, too, the strategy came in at the bottom.