Crédit Agricole Asset Management has launched a Volatility World Equity fund within its Luxembourg SICAV. This UCITS III compliant sub-fund aims to benefit from equity market volatility in the Eurozone, North America and Asia, offering investors an original source of performance through investment in volatility as an asset class. CAAM has long considered that volatility, besides being a classic risk indicator, is an asset class in its own right: introducing volatility into an equity or balanced portfolio can, the firm believes, improve its risk return profile through its de-correlated behaviour with both equity and credit markets. Volatility World Equities aims to benefit from global aversion to risk and the market extremes that it generates. It offers investors pure, flexible and optimal exposure to the fluctuations of the Eurozone, North American and Asian stock markets, thanks to its variable indexation grid. This tool enables the fund to take advantage of both medium term trends in volatility and short term fluctuations. The fund offers a positive indexation to volatility when this is below its historical average and a negative indexation when it is sharply above. Short term fluctuations in volatility are an important additional source of performance that can take over from medium-term trends. The new element in this fund lies in its flexible geographic allocation. Decisions on volatility exposure are based on the outlook for the three zones and allow the team to manage the portfolio by capitalising on attractive de-correlations between volatilities. CAAM manages assets of more than €5 billion ($7.8 billion) in its Dynarbitrage Volatility and Volatility Euro Equities.