Sonny Abrol's Long-Short Hedge Fund Has Soared 66% This Year
Sonny Arbol's Long-Short Hedge Fund Has Soared 66% This Year
(Bloomberg) -- Pond Image Capital LLC, former Deutsche Bank proprietary trader Sonny Abrol’s long-short fund, climbed 66% this year through June 10, while the S&P 500 fell 1.3%.
Abrol uses a hybrid of fundamental and proprietary technical indicators for his fund, which overlays advanced option strategies to control risk and enhance returns.
The fund was officially launched in August 2018 to external investors and cumulatively returned 55% since then, compared with about 8% for the S&P 500, according to a fund performance letter seen by Bloomberg. It has assets under management of $28 million.
The San Diego-based fund’s top trades this year included going long on technology, cloud computing and data centers, while shorting any business that required public assembly. For example, Abrol “aggressively” shorted airlines, casinos, cruise lines and restaurants near the end of January, soon after human-to-human transmission was first confirmed in China.
Abrol pointed to his prop trading days heading Deutsche’s Delta Arbitrage trading desk to explain how the fund beat the market, saying in an interview that “when you are in that environment for equity trading and you are expected to have a positive rate of return every month, you really learn this business, in the trenches, so to speak, by developing a sophisticated strategy and advanced tools for trading and investing.”
For all the sophisticated tools, though, Abrol eventually concludes, “this business is much more art than science.”
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