Avendus hires Ambit's Andrew Holland for hedge fund business

He worked with Ambit Capital for nearly eight years

Avendus Capital on Thursday announced its move to set up a hedge fund to augment its portfolio of Alternative Asset Management businesses. It has roped in members from Ambit Capital, including Andrew Holland, Vaibhav Sanhavi and Bhautik Ambani, who will take charge as chief executive officer (CEO), co-CEO and marketing head of the hedge fund business, respectively. They will be assisted by a team of fund managers and research analysts. Holland will report to Ranu Vohra, managing director (MD) & CEO of Avendus.

Holland worked with Ambit Capital for nearly eight years now. Holland had also served as the MD of the proprietary trading desk of Merrill Lynch between May 2006 and December 2008.

During their time at Ambit, Holland and Sanghavi have established one of the first Long-Short funds in India with assets under management of over Rs 1,100 crore, making it by far the largest Alternative Investment Fund III category, said a note put out by Avendus. Äccording to Bloomberg, the Ambit Alpha Fund was ranked in the top 91 percentile among 800 global hedge funds in the past one year.

Ranu Vohra, MD & CEO, Avendus Capital said: "Andrew has an impeccable reputation and we are fortunate to have Andrew, Vaibhav and team work with us at Avendus. We look forward to working with them on long-short and long-only strategies and taking our business to the next level of growth."