Dublin, 13th February 2018

A Pendragon Capital-TPG Axon duo are gearing up to launch a special situations value-focused fund with Marble Bar, HFMWeek has learned.

Kaveh Sheibani and Nicolas Gourdain are co-portfolio managers of London-based Lexcor Capital, which will start trading on 1 March.

Lexcor will predominantly focus on European value securities that could benefit from events to create a core portfolio of 15 long positions and 10 ‘alpha’ shorts.

The fund, a Cayman master-feeder, may opportunistically trade other developed markets and other parts of the capital structure.

Sheibani and Gourdain will aim to deliver between 10% and 15% net returns in their concentrated, high-conviction strategy over a full market cycle.

A founders’ share class for the first $100m invested will charge 1/15, with fees reverting to 1.5/20 thereafter. The fund will offer investors monthly liquidity at 90 days’ notice.

The strategy is scalable but in the medium-term has capacity of around $500m. Starting assets are not known but HFMWeek understands that the founders are investing significant personal assets.

The duo have been working together for the last year and a half in preparation for the launch and have known each other for a decade, according to a person familiar with the situation.

Lexcor Capital was incorporated on Companies House and became an appointed representative of Marble Bar Asset Management (MBAM) in November last year.

Since 2016, MBAM has been transitioning its business to a platform which uses technology to identify and develop emerging manager talent.

MBAM aims to selectively partner with new hedge fund teams by providing them with technology, infrastructure, operations and investor relations support.

Lexcor is the third addition to the MBAM stable, which also works with Elephant Asset Management, an emerging markets-focused firm founded by former Aperios Partners CIO Christina McGuire, and Velox, a European market-neutral equity strategy.

Former Salomon Brothers equity trader Sheibani launched Pendragon in 1999 with a $250m seed investment from the bank.

The event-driven fund grew to manage $3.5bn at its peak before closing in 2008. Sheibani and his co-founder, Julian Harvey Wood, then joined GLG before leaving in 2010 to re-launch Pendragon.

The fund shuttered again in 2015, despite delivering positive returns in every year since 2010, according to reports at the time.

Gourdain has spent the majority of his career at TPG-Axon and Montrica, which merged with Dinakar Singh’s hedge fund in 2010, focused predominantly on European equities.

Lexcor, which is using Goldman Sachs and Bank of America Merrill Lynch as its prime brokers and Centaur Fund Services as its administrator, expects the majority of interest to come from US institutional investors.