Aviva Investors Multi-Strategy (AIMS) Fixed Income Fund

The Aviva Investors Multi-Strategy (AIMS) Fixed Income Fund offers investors access to a diversified portfolio of 25-35 global fixed income strategies.

Global exposure

The fund, launched in Australia in February this year, targets a three per cent per annum gross return over the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) cash rate (before charges), over rolling three-year periods, and aims to deliver that with volatility lower than global fixed income.

The fund accesses the global bond market by investing directly in bonds or by using derivatives. Investments may include asset-backed securities (ABS) and mortgage-backed securities (MBS), which are typically invested in European and North American markets.

"We've launched AIMS fixed income here at Aviva Investors to help address some of the core underlying issues we believe investors face in today's more challenging and difficult market conditions," fund manager James McAlevey says. "We are very long-term in terms of the way that we aim to deliver these outcomes for investors."

Strategies

"We tend to allocate risk to between 25 and 35 individual investment strategies, and it's also important to recognise that with the proliferation of risk parity type vehicles, there's no quantitative input, this is a purely qualitative and judgmental process," McAlevey says.

The fund might seek to benefit from currency movements or divergence of yields between sovereign debt. Another strategy it might invest in is emerging market growth, through investing directly in emerging market sovereign debt. And it could also seek to take advantage of a rise in commodity prices, by investing in the sovereign debt of commodity exporting countries.

The fund has a minimum investment of $500,000 and carries a management cost of 1.19 per cent of the fund's net asset value.