Ballast Capital Management and Investcorp form strategic partnership

Investcorp, the alternative asset manager, and Ballast Capital Management, a hedge fund manager based in New York, announced that they have formed a strategic partnership. Ballast, which specializes in long-short equity, is the latest addition to Investcorp’s single manager platform.  This partnership will offer Gulf investors a new opportunity in this strategy. 

Ballast is led by Robert M. Kaynor, Chief Investment Officer, and Ryan M. O’Sullivan, President.  The team has more than 40 years of combined long-short equity investing experience, as well as demonstrated expertise in successfully managing assets in varying market environments. Kaynor, and two of the investment team members, Mason Stark, and Joanna Wald, previously worked together at Ramius LLC, a multi-billion dollar hedge fund. 

Ballast joins Investcorp’s platform of hedge fund managers. Within this platform, Investcorp provides its global client base, both in the West and in the Gulf with access to talented investment managers, supported by ongoing monitoring and operational oversight and control. Managers, in turn, benefit from the backing of a leading financial services organization, including access to Investcorp’s global marketing and sales infrastructure and established client base.   

In addition to its single manager platform, Investcorp provides managed account and fund of funds solutions. Investcorp’s hedge fund business has approximately $4.7 billion in assets under management.  

Mohammed Al Shroogi, Investcorp’s President of Gulf business, said: “By committing our ‎own capital and overseeing the operation of these funds managers, our clients can be ‎assured that our interests are fully aligned with theirs. We created Investcorp’s Single ‎Manager Platform to help institutional investors diversify their hedge fund holdings by ‎including the industry's experts in their portfolios. With hedge funds outperforming equity ‎funds during the global economic slowdown, we have seen the level of interest in hedge ‎funds grow rapidly, especially in the Middle East. Through partnerships such as this with ‎Ballast, Investcorp is affirming its commitment to providing its clients with the most exciting ‎and diverse investment strategies available.”‎ 

Deepak Gurnani, head of Investcorp’s hedge fund business, said: “Ballast is an important addition to our single manager platform. At Investcorp our focus has always been on alpha. Ballast is a long-short hedge fund manager that has demonstrated its capabilities to generate alpha and strong returns with low market beta. It is one of the few managers to have the ability to generate alpha on the long and short side. Our alliance with Ballast follows our previous successful partnerships, and we expect to continue to add additional such relationships in order to offer our clients the opportunity to invest with well regarded hedge fund managers.” 

Robert Kaynor, Ballast’s CIO, said: “Partnership with Investcorp offers Ballast a unique opportunity to join Investcorp’s well differentiated platform with proven global reach and experience. We continue to see significant advantages for our strategy as stock correlations break down and alpha generation sets up readily. We value the opportunity to align ourselves with a well known and stable organization. We look forward to leveraging our relationship with Investcorp to enhance our business growth and capabilities.”