Long short funds available for ISAs

christhedon

Hi,

How do I find out what long short funds are available for being bought in an ISA wrapper?

Thanks,

Chris

Archi_Bald

There's at least a dozen S&S ISA providers with whom you can buy literally any fund you fancy. Which funds are you interested in?

christhedon

Well I wanted to get a starting list that I could choose from and buy through fidelity. The other way round wasn't working. I'd find a fund and type it into fidelity and get no results. Starting point for me now is to gt a full list of long short funds that I can out in an Isa. Does that make sense or am I missing the point?

bowlhead99

Many long/short funds are known as 'absolute return' funds as they try to achieve an absolute return in all market conditions rather than a return correlated with the general market.

If you go to Trustnet.com and filter OEICs and Unit Trusts by that category you will find plenty as a start: http://www.trustnet.com/Investments/Perf.aspx?univ=O&Pf_Sector=O:IMAABR

Or you could look at Investment Trusts and select 'Hedge' as the fund focus, you'll find a few more. Any investment trust or investment company or ETF traded on the London stock exchange would be buyable at a decent broker.

Or if you're looking at investment trusts/companies in general you could use the filter tool at the AIC to find some: http://www.theaic.co.uk/aic/find-compare-investment-companies to find some in the Hedge category.

There will be plenty out there not listed in those particular categories though - for example Artemis Strategic Assets is long some types of equities and has a big short on global government bonds, but it sits in the 'flexible investment' benchmark category. Others might be in 'specialist'. In the world of investment trusts over at the AIC, there are plenty of funds that don't call themselves hedge funds but adopt long/short strategies - for example Sanditon's investment trust is simply in the Europe category, but as the second page of the factsheet (http://documents.financialexpress.net/Literature/9859402.pdf) shows, it has plenty of shorts, just like its investment thesis said it would.

So, it's not that easy to come up with a definitive list because that can be down to how and where the manager markets themselves. Most hedge funds / absolute returns funds / long-short funds aren't offered to retail customers at all as they are private institutional partnerships. As a fund manager it's likely to be a right pain to deal with daily subscriptions and redemptions in man-on-the-street sized chunks rather than deal with institutions, and the regulatory environment means you can't be as flexible in what you're offering if you're making it available to non-professionals.

It seems the Fidelity fund supermarket website doesn't list absolute return funds as a category to select on their fund types, and I don't know if they offer a brokerage service to let you buy things directly on market like other ISAs would. Still, just looking up the words 'absolute return' in the search tool at Fidelity gave plenty of hits - for example here's a Henderson UK one: https://www.fidelity.co.uk/investor/research-funds/fund-supermarket/factsheet/composition.page?idtype=ISIN&fundid=GB00B5KKCX12

hth