Investors, they say, have famously short memories. The experience of 2008, however, may have snapped them out of their collective amnesia.
“Certainly within Europe, many investors are still suffering from the trauma of 2008, when they were hit by gating and the Madoff scandal as well as by negative performance,” says Dan Mannix, head of business development at London-based RWC Partners. “Those three factors made private banks and traditional high-net-worth allocators to funds of funds extremely wary of the concept of offshore hedge funds.”
RWC, which since June 2010 has been 49% owned by Schroders, identified this particular development relatively early. Originally set up in 2000 under the name of MPC Investors, it was rebranded as RWC in 2007, and today has about $4.5 billion under management.
AUM almost doubled in 2010 alone, and Mannix says that the principal engine of growth over the...