About Us
Ironclad is a boutique asset manager specialising in offshore alternative investment solutions tailored towards South African institutions, family offices and wealth managers. Our strategies can be accessed through fund-level allocations; segregated accounts; life wrappers (personal share portfolios) and trading platforms.
Investment Philosophy
We believe that markets are mostly efficient. As a result, generating reliable alpha from stock picking or market timing is extremely difficult. We instead look for outperformance in the land of alternative beta: overlaying simple-to-understand hedge fund strategies on top of pure beta to enhance expected returns. Overlaying alternative beta also allows us to diversify well without having to dilute pure beta. The result is 2-in-1 or 3-in-1 portfolios that make capital work harder.
Difficulty to Generate
Source of Returns
Hard to Generate
Expensive
Security Selection
Market Timing
Pure Alpha
Rare
Alternative Beta
Harvest by overlaying exposure
Easy to Generate
Low Cost
Pure Beta
Harvest risk premia by simply buying and holding a diversified mix of risky assets
Trend Following
Tail Risk Hedging
Risk Parity Diversifiers
Fair Weather Beta
Currency Hedging
Equity, Bonds,
etc.
Leveraging Offence Into Defence
The best overlay candidates (1) earn a standalone risk premium (2) have low correlation to your core exposure and (3) outperform during tough times. They can also be easily benchmarked to accurately track performance. Incorporating these overlays can bring about attractive defensive benefits through better diversification. As we focus on solutions for long-horizon investors, we believe that these defensive benefits should be leveraged into stronger offence as having solid diversification brings a balance that enables you to hold more exposure, thereby increasing expected returns. The future will bring surprises. We believe in preparing for them, not trying to predict them.
