Amundi Funds Absolute Global Dividend managed under delegation by BFT Gestion is a new sub-fund of the coordinated Luxembourg SICAV Amundi Funds. It offers investors a solution allowing them to capture the potential downgrade of estimated dividends compared to those who are actually paid by the companies. The more the markets undervalue dividends, the more the gains potential of the fund will be important. Warin Buntrock, fund manager, uses both dividend futures on the Euro Stoxx 50 Index, the FTSE 100, the Nikkei 225 but also dividend swaps on the U.S. S & P 500.

Warin Buntrock mainly implements directional strategies (to buy and to sell) on these indices. The investment horizon is relatively close (from 2014 to 2016), with opened positions, depending on the level of risk premium displayed in the market.

In addition to these directional strategies, he also uses relative value strategies:

• "dividend yield" strategies, such as the purchase of a dividend futures and the simultaneous sale of the Underlying Index;
• strategies to anticipate the curve steepening or flattening of the implied forward dividends curve;
• intermarket spread strategies for the same maturity between two different markets.

If he does not consider dividends as a new asset class, as they are intrinsically linked to the equity markets, he believes, however, that dividend futures help in establishing a pure strategy focused on the "dividend" component without being exposed to other equity risks.

Futures markets allow leverage and therefore bearing risks, a "strict" risk management policy was implemented, based on internal constraints in terms of market exposure. "Thus, the net exposure of the fund is always between -20% and +100%. These asymmetric boundaries are explained by the fact that we prefer to have a long bias due to the nature of the dividends market "said Warin Buntrock.

So far, investor’s feedback is encouraging. As proof, the fund launched on April 15th, 2013, now boasts 65 million euros in assets under management. The objective is to achieve an outstanding 150 / € 200 million over a period of 12-month.