The latest in funds and investment news from around Europe.

RWC Partners
London-based RWC Partners has launched the RWC Diversified Return Fund after hiring a senior multi-strategy team from Agilis Investment Management in May.

RWC said the new fund will be led by Clark Fenton, along with Charles Crowson and Praveen Kanakamedala, all formerly of Agilis, and anchored around the credit cycle and four distinct phases. “The current phase, over-extended leverage, is characterised by high debt levels, deteriorating credit quality, rich asset values and low levels of volatility,” it said.

“With the credit cycle flashing danger signals, the fund’s focus in 2019 has been to stay on the right side of market liquidity,” Fenton added.

The fund mirrors a diversification strategy which the firm has offered investors since 2017. It provides exposure via both long and short positions across fixed income, equity and commodity markets, RWC said. It has suggested that the strengthening dollar and the Federal Reserve’s intervention in the overnight repo market in September could signal a repeat of the liquidity issues the market faced in Q4 2018.

Invesco
Invesco has launched a UCITS exchange-traded fund tracking the Kuwait equity market before it is included into an MSCI Emerging Markets Index planned for next year.

The Invesco MSCI Kuwait UCITS ETF provides exposure to about 85 per cent of the market capitalisation in Kuwait, including companies involved in the nation’s various economic and cultural development projects.

MSCI, the index provider, said it will promote Kuwait to the MSCI Emerging Markets Index in June 2020, subject to structural enhancements to the Kuwait equity market being completed by the end of November this year. Assuming that deadline is met, Kuwait will enter the index with a weighting of approximately 0.5 per cent. The inclusion could drive billions of dollars’ worth of flows into Kuwait equities, given that an estimated $1.8 trillion of global assets use MSCI Emerging Markets as their benchmark.