MGTS Downing Diversified Opportunities Fund

Jon Gumpel is head of Multi-Asset and was one of the founders of Brooks Macdonald.  Jon is an award-winning manager of the £700m Defensive Capital Fund over 9 years. He is a proven manager with over 35 years' experience of managing multi-asset portfolios across economic cycles.  He is also the lead Portfolio Manager for the MGTS Downing Diversified Opportunities Fund.

A proven multi-asset manager with over 35 years’ experience, Jon was an early adopter of many alternative asset and derivative strategies to great effect, in both fund and discretionary format. He has worked consistently with quantitative analysis techniques and has developed a hedge-fund quality proprietary system for his current MGTS Diversified Opportunities UCITS Fund (previously SVS Aubrey Citadel Fund) and third-party mandate (Sentinel Navigator). The Fund and Mandate were #1 & 2 in performance terms in the IA Mixed Asset 20/60% Equity sector in 2025.

Paul Adams is Head of Portfolio Management in the Liquid Alternatives team. Paul built a series of successful cash equities and equity derivatives businesses over his 20+ year career in investment banking at Royal Bank of Canada, Nomura, Lehman Brothers and WestLB Panmure. Most recently, at Royal Bank of Canada, Paul was the European Head of Cash Equity and Flow Derivative Sales (part of the Global Equities division). Paul has a broad set of capital markets expertise and has directly covered a mix of institutional clients, corporates, wealth managers, pensions/insurers, and hedge funds. Paul began his career as a Chemical Engineer and then worked for 5 years at Chubb Insurance.

Renato Guerrieri, Head of Quantitative Strategy, brings over 15 years of experience in wealth and asset management, beginning his career at Deutsche Bank. Renato specialises in proprietary model design, factor-based analysis, and scenario simulations, supported by an MBA in Quantitative Finance and a BSc in Banking & Finance.

Find out more about Jon, Paul, and the rest of the Liquid Alternatives team.

Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future performance.

The MGTS Downing Diversified Opportunities Fund is a unique, liquid and defensive portfolio diversifier. Designed for modern markets delivering real returns and low correlation to traditional equities and bonds.  The Fund targets a mix of yield and compounding defensive returns with a managed risk profile.  

This Fund can play a core role in a multi-asset portfolio - aiming to deliver real returns while enhancing diversification and overall portfolio metrics including alpha, beta, correlation and volatility.  Providing a resilient, balanced foundation.

The Fund is designed to generate returns that are less correlated to the movements of traditional Bond and Equity benchmarks, to act as a genuine global portfolio diversifier with compelling risk adjusted returns.  We achieve this by focusing on consistency of returns, relative value, structural opportunities, and returns that perform across a broader range of markets and asset classes. Diversification across different return drivers helps reduce concentration risk and enhance multi-asset portfolio metrics when used as a core allocation.

Volatility is reduced by understanding the portfolio drivers of downside risk, controlling position sizes, and avoiding sustained exposure to market beta. Correlation is lowered by targeting idiosyncratic and structural return drivers that are not reliant on equity or credit markets rising.  By combining disciplined risk limits, diversification across strategies and instruments, and active risk monitoring, the Fund aims to deliver compelling stand-alone returns with low sensitivity to traditional asset classes.

Diversification in the Fund is driven by risk behaviour rather than asset labels. Instead of simply allocating across markets or instruments, we diversify across distinct sources of return with different risk characteristics and payoff profiles.

Each position is constructed with defined risk parameters, meaning diversification is intentional and measurable, not incidental. This allows us to combine strategies whose returns are driven by different market dynamics, helping reduce concentration, volatility, and correlation without relying on broad market exposure. As a result, diversification is used as a risk control tool, not just a portfolio construction convention.

The Fund combines four complementary return drivers; Fixed Income, Systematic Equity, Thematic Returns, and Alternatives.  Each chosen for its distinct risk and return behaviour. Fixed Income helps anchor portfolio stability and deliver a defensive yield, Systematic Equity is quant-driven and captures defined, time limited opportunities, Thematic Returns provides exposure to specific structural drivers, and Alternatives add differentiated, low correlation returns. Managed within a single, disciplined risk framework, these drivers work together to diversify sources of return, reduce reliance on any single market, and deliver compelling performance that is less correlated to traditional Bond and Equity benchmarks.