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Peter Dahlberg, Anna Svahn & Martin Sandquist
Antiloop AB was founded in 2020 by Martin Sandquist, Anna Svahn, and Peter Dahlberg with the purpose of creating a multi-strategy hedge fund based on combining several different asset classes and approaches.
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It began as a mistake.
Not ours, but a mistake nonetheless. It was late summer 2016, and hedge funds had struggled since the financial crisis. Once darlings of the industry for their record-beating returns, these funds had failed to return figures comparable to the S&P 500, and one big reason for this was short selling.
Although Antiloop’s co-founder and CEO, Anna Svahn, could see that the stock market's valuation was stretched, she also recognized that the continuous injection of central bank liquidity would make a prolonged bear market unlikely. She thought that instead of shorting stocks, there must be a better way to hedge drawdown and find low-valued assets that would benefit from a future high inflationary environment.
A few months later, Svahn’s idea had evolved into Cygnus, a tactical asset allocation strategy focusing on using soft commodities and precious metals as a hedge against drawdowns in the US stock market. For feedback, she turned to the then recently retired hedge fund manager Martin Sandquist, and the now co-founders of Antiloop met for the very first time over lunch to discuss tactical asset allocation strategies, commodities, and monetary policy.
A little more than a year earlier, Sandquist had just left Lynx Asset Management, which he co-founded in 1999, to focus on managing his own money in a family office structure. Having pursued a 100% systematic methodology his entire career, Sandquist embarked on a journey towards a discretionary-systematic hybrid approach. The core idea was to apply several uncorrelated discretionary and systematic strategies in an attempt to smooth out the uneven returns generated by systematic trend-following.
After leaving Lynx Asset Management, Sandquist spent four years developing four uncorrelated strategies in his own family office while tracking the returns of Svahn’s allocation strategy Cygnus. After sharing an office to discuss trading ideas and the overall macro outlook for a few months, the duo realized that their strategies with different time horizons and methodology worked perfectly together, and the idea of founding Antiloop together was born.
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