Amit Shabi (pictured), chief executive of Paris-based event-driven and merger arbitrage specialist Bernheim, Dreyfus & Co, says the firm’s Diva Synergy fund and its recently-launched Ucits version is poised to capitalise on an expected pick-up in European M&A volumes, which should create more lucrative investment opportunities and better performance. GFM:

Ilya Golubovich (pictured), managing partner of specialist clean technology fund manager I2BF and Irakli Menabde, manager of the I2BF-Arbat Technology Fund, say the fund is unique in its field by employing a relative value strategy with a fully systematic investment process based on the notion of consistent outperformance.   GFM:

Michael Azlen, founder and executive chairman of Frontier Capital Management, says his firm’s index-based approach to multi-asset investing is modelled on the tried and tested approach of US university endowments, aims to create a globally diversified portfolio through exposure to eight traditional and alternative asset classes or strategies to generate

Phoenix Investment Adviser, which focuses on investing in the bonds of out-of-favour companies whose securities’ prices have declined substantially, recently opened to outside investors a fund investing in the equity of the same ‘stressed’ companies. Founder and chief investment officer Jeff Peskind says such stocks may have significant upside potential

Dr Jan Auspurg (pictured), a fund manager within the quant team at Hamburg-based Aquila Capital, says the AC Spectrum Fund, a Luxembourg-domiciled Ucits that generated a return of 9.98 per cent last August amid massive equity market losses, takes into account not only the strengths of trend-following strategies but their

AIMhedge chief investment officer Richard Bibb says the firm’s combination of a systematic, emotion-free trading approach over a large, well-diversified basket of futures markets and an effective active risk management system is a very powerful argument for investors just starting to look for better-performing investments in the wake of the

Derren Geiger, chief operating officer of Cornerstone Acquisition & Management and portfolio manager of the Caritas funds, which invest in portfolios of private oil and natural gas royalty interests located within the continental US, says a number of factors make this a particularly advantageous time to acquire oil and gas

Daniel Schweizer, chief executive and chairman of Horizon21 spin-off Active Alpha, says the firm is particularly nimble in executing its long/short equity trading strategy through very liquid large-cap equities and options, enabling the AA Equity Fund to end 2008 in positive territory and helping Active Alpha to differentiate itself from

Jing Sun, investment director and fund manager for the PSigma Global Equity Fund at New York-based Centre Asset Management, says the fund, launched last June, focuses on the fundamentals of wealth creation and destruction akin to the way a traditional, long-term-focused corporate financier looking at all aspects of the business,

José Luis Jiménez, chief executive of March Gestión de Fondos, the investment arm of Spain’s Banca March, says that a combination of macroeconomic analysis and analysis of financial markets, together with the valuation of companies, is the most critical process for the success of the Spanish firm’s investments. GFM: What