PL AMC Launches AQUA Dollar Fund

India’s pioneering quantamental, style agnostic and adaptive multifactor strategy now available for global investors

Siddharth Vora, Fund Manager, Head of Quant Investment Strategies at PL Asset Management

FinTech BizNews Service 

Mumbai, September 26, 2024: PL Asset Management (the asset management arm of PL Capital – Prabhudas Lilladher), has launched AQUA Dollar Fund, India’s pioneering quantamental, style agnostic and adaptive multifactor strategy. The flexicap quant-based investment strategy offers global investors a seamless gateway to India’s burgeoning equity markets via dollar-denominated investments. Global investors, including individuals (foreign nationals and NRIs) and institutions can invest in this fund through the CAT I FPI route with a minimum investment size of $125000.

AQUA Dollar Fund is a testament to PL’s 80-year legacy as one of India’s most trusted financial services organisations and its commitment to innovation and value-addition. Adopting a ‘Man with Machine’ approach, the open-ended, long-only equity fund combines PL’s deep research expertise with state-of-the-art quantitative technology. The result is a strategy that aims to deliver superior risk management and sustainable alpha (outperformance) across macro and market cycles.

Siddharth Vora, Fund Manager, Head of Quant Investment Strategies at PL Asset Management, said, “The AQUA Dollar Fund is a significant milestone in bringing our quantitative investing expertise to a global audience. It follows the remarkable success of our AQUA PMS, which delivered 63.98% returns since inception in June 2023 (as of 31 August 2024), compared to 40.07% for the BSE 500 TRI – an outperformance of 23.91%. It also consistently ranked among India’s top-performing flexicap funds. We believe that the AQUA Dollar Fund will also deliver impressive returns while managing risks effectively.”

“As one of India’s pioneering 100% quant-based asset management firms, our strategies employ rigorously tested, rules-based, and data-driven systems to eliminate traditional behavioural biases like greed, fear, hope, and regret, ensuring disciplined, objective, and emotionless decision-making,” he added.

Key principles of AQUA Dollar Fund: 

1. Style & Sector Adaptability: The strategy is designed to shift its investment style between quality, value, growth, low risk, or momentum, while also adjusting its sectoral exposures across cyclicals and non-cyclicals, based on prevailing market and macro conditions.
2. Holistic Multi-Factor Approach: It integrates fundamental, technical, valuation, macro, risk, sector, and sentiment analytics to objectively evaluate and rank securities, ensuring a robust stock selection process.
3. Benchmark-Agnostic, Flexicap Strategy: It dynamically diversifies across large, mid, and small caps, adjusting allocations based on risk-reward opportunities across market cycles, irrespective of benchmark allocations.
4. Responsive Risk Management using Periodic Rebalancing: The portfolio is restructured bi-monthly to align with changing market risk conditions by adjusting its asset and market cap mix, investment style, sector exposures, or beta levels.
5. Equal-Weighted Portfolio for Optimal Diversification: The strategy allocates equally across 25-30 stocks, minimising concentration risk while ensuring repeatable performance through a systematic strategy.

AQUA Dollar Fund is developed by PL’s multidisciplinary team of experts, including CAs, CFAs, CMTs, mathematicians, risk analysts, economists, quantitative analysts, statisticians, and Python programmers. Over the past five years, this specialised team has crafted highly differentiated multi-asset and equity quant strategies.

The launch of this fund comes at a time when India is on a remarkable economic trajectory as the world’s fastest-growing emerging economy and the fifth-largest market globally. With resilient macroeconomic indicators, strong domestic consumption, and favourable demographics, India offers a highly attractive investment landscape. This fund provides global investors with a unique and timely opportunity to capitalise on these growth drivers through a meticulously crafted, quant-based investment vehicle.