What: Opportunity to invest in Anato Opportunity Fund I, LP, a California based fund, managed by Anato Advisory Services, LLC (“Anato”). Anato is an innovative, alternative investment management company focusing on extracting value from anomalies within the structured product markets. Anato specializes in identifying and creating asymmetric opportunities and capitalizing on inefficiencies. Anato’ s comprehensive analysis of deal structure, asset cash-flows (past and postulated future) and legal intricacies provides greater insight in the identification of opportunities. One such example is the collapsing of seasoned mortgage-backed securitizations with the goal of recognizing an arbitrage between the cost of calling the deal and the value of the underlying assets. Equanimous is the extraction of deal arbitrage from mis-valued, mis-modeled or un-modeled assets.
Bret Ackerman presenting: Bret founded Anato and is the Fund’s portfolio manager. Bret is part of Anato’ s investment team and wears the hat of risk manager. Bret will be sharing his insights on taking a ‘banking’ approach to investing in structured products.
Firm Overview:
Anato Investment Group LLC (DE) will be launching Anato Opportunity Fund I, L.P. in September 2015. Anato is an innovative management company rooted in true philanthropy. Anato seeks to deliver strong risk-adjusted returns to its investors while committing to donate a portion of the Fund Manager’s earnings to worldwide charitable organizations. Anato seeks to raise between $100 and $120 million USD, and will not exceed these figures, as the Firm believes that the opportunity set does not currently allow for outsized returns with the management of excess capital. The Fund will use no conventional leverage, which is not common in the current markets. The Manager will only use leverage for the purposes of hedging its long positions.
We believe our global clients are looking for local partners who can generate long term investment value in an ethical manner, and without taking undue and uncalculated risks. We have therefore created an investment team which follows processes that help identify mis-priced or mis-valued opportunities within the structured products markets. Additionally, our size allows us to care about smaller opportunities which the multi-billion dollar firms do not allocate resources to.
Investment Strategy:
Anato Opportunity Fund I, LP (“the Fund”) is a fixed income alternatives investment vehicle focused on residential, commercial and asset backed securities, along with their related underlying assets. The Fund seeks to generate strong risk-adjusted returns by identifying various market inefficiencies and asymmetric opportunities. Examples of inefficiencies include mis-valuations due to structural complexities, reps and warranties, legal settlements, and differentiations between our proprietary cash-flow model and those of third party software providers, such as Intex® and Bloomberg®. Asymmetric opportunities include exploiting the spread between whole loan and secondary markets (which can be recognized through the execution of call rights), and arbitraging the distinct buyers of various cash-flows (realized through re-securitization).
The Fund is managed by Bret M. Ackerman of Anato Investment Group, LLC. The investment professionals have extensive structural knowledge of MBS/ABS transactions and will take full advantage of their capital structure and credit expertise. This team has extensive knowledge of where these securities and loans reside. As such, the IA has an advantage in the valuation and sourcing of investment opportunities. The IA simultaneously employs a deep loan-level and deal-level analysis in our approach to every investment. This is the cornerstone of the Fund’s competitive advantage.
Intended portfolio composition (expressed as a percentage of AUM):
Core Investments (~50 – 80%):
- Agency and Non-Agency RMBS (such as Excess Servicing Strips, Deep RMBS Credit, Non-CUSIP Securities, Residuals & NIMs)
- Call Rights & Subsequent Collateral
- Single Asset Seasoned CMBS
- Securitizations
Special Situations (~10 – 40%):
- Non-QM Loans
- Full Re-Underwriting
- Low LTV / Low DTI
- Bank Secured Bridge Loans
- Credit Specific Opportunities
- Distressed Debt Securities
- Private Companies
Asymmetric Opportunities (0 – 15%):
- Early Identification of Positively Convex Return Profile
- Disproportionate Trading Deviation
- Determination of an asset’s inherent mis-priced market valuation
- European RMBS
- Corporate Debt
Private Companies
Executive Bios:
Bret M. Ackerman, Founder, CEO, CIO
Bret Ackerman is the founder of Anato. He will be leading the trading of securities and the management of the fund’s portfolio, responsible for reviewing every one of Anato’ s trades. He has over 18 years of combined structured finance and structured products trading experience. He has held positions in loan origination, structuring, securitization of debt instruments & securities, and the sourcing & facilitating of direct investment opportunities. Bret’s career began, at Bear Stearns in 1997, where he grew into the role of Vice President and was responsible for the hedging and trading of a 12 billion USD portfolio of firm-managed assets across the product spectrum. In 2006, Bret joined Barclays Capital as the Head of Non-Agency RMBS Securitization. At Barclays, Bret was responsible for the creation and implementation of their Private Label/Non-Agency RMBS securitization business. He managed a team that both sourced and securitized over 1 billion USD of private label RMBS monthly, and was responsible for the hedging and trading of a multi-billion dollar book of assets. Under Bret’s guidance, his team at Barclays worked tirelessly to hedge credit and rate risk, thereby mitigating significant losses during the 2007-2008 financial crisis. During this time, Bret was listed amongst Trader Monthly’s “Top 30 Traders Under 30 Years Old” on August 17, 2007. Following Barclays, Bret was a Managing Director at MF Global, Head of RMBS Trading at StormHarbour Securities, and most recently, Head of RMBS Sales & Trading at Odeon Capital Group. Bret was recruited by and became a member of Binghamton University’s Men’s NCAA soccer team. Concurrently, he received his Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from The School of Management, with a concentration in Finance & Management Information Systems (“MIS”). Bret holds FINRA Series 7 & Series 63 licenses. In 2014, Bret received presidential recognition in being awarded The President’s Volunteer Service Award® from the Corporation for National and Community Service. This honor comes from his responsibility to the community, the non-profit sector, and the Office of the President of The United States. Specifically, Bret focuses on job placement for people with extreme hearing impairment, as well as individuals previously incarcerated. He has also volunteered his time organizing and implementing post-Hurricane Sandy rehabilitation projects in Staten Island. Bret currently sponsors and manages a weekly inner-city sports program and a monthly school outing for at-risk students.
Jisook Choi, COO, Regulatory Contact
Jisook Choi oversees all operations of the fund including trading and relationships with third parties. She has over 20 years of combined structured products and structured finance banking, sales and operations experience. Jisook was most recently Head of Business Development & Marketing at Altum Capital Management, LLC responsible for capital raising, investor relations and business expansion. From 2010-2013, Jisook was an Executive Director in fixed income sales at UBS, sourcing and selling structured products including CLO/CDOs, CMBS, RMBS, ABS and complex structured long-term financing/balance sheet reduction facilities and regulatory capital reduction investments. Prior to UBS, Jisook was a Senior Vice President in fixed income sales at Broadpoint Gleacher, sourcing and selling all structured products. After starting her career at KPMG Peat Marwick LLP as a Senior Auditor/CPA, Jisook joined Bear Stearns in 1997 as a Vice President and later became a Managing Director, structuring and securitizing transactions. Jisook graduated magna cum laude from the Leonard N. Stern School of Business at New York University where she obtained her Bachelor of Science in Accounting. Jisook holds FINRA Series 7 & Series 63 licenses, and is in the process of reactivating her status as a CPA.
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