A Message From The Fund Manager,
Adrian Courtenay

Dear Investor,

Welcome to the GA-Courtenay Special Situations Fund.

Our mission is to provide an enhanced investment vehicle, open to both institutions and retail investors and which strongly aligns outcomes in favour of unit holders: a fund designed to deliver consistently across diverse market conditions, with performance advantage, high safety, and enhanced transparency.

At the core of our Performance, Protected strategy is a fully deployed equity investment book targeting long-term allocation to excellent companies at attractive pricing. This is twinned with a positive carry hedge structure that works by combining merger arbitrage yield with index put option protection. The resulting portfolio construct, by mitigating the market’s beta, enhances both absolute return and leverage suitability characteristics, empowering the fund to perform across a wide range of market environments.

With regard to the fund’s equity investments, whilst the identification of high-quality companies may appear straightforward, delivering material alpha in modern markets requires more than traditional frameworks.

The most critical factor is identifying business models with enduring barriers to entry, without which competition kills profits over time and substitution eliminates revenue growth. A second requirement is that the corporate can deliver above average long-term value growth by productive reinvestment within their core domain. Thirdly, we require these attributes to be reinforced by a number of additional shareholder-favourable tests: leadership calibre, workforce merit and coordination efficiency, division of labour, combined with assessments of scale economies, network effects, technological advantage, tailwinds from free-riding, and the presence of value catalysts.

The companies we select are thus described as special situations – differentiated by their structural superiority and idiosyncratic potential. Our process is further enhanced by extensive, internally developed code-based systems that optimise opportunity discovery, research throughput and execution agility.

A positive carry hedge structure

The fund targets full equity deployment across our selected companies, at the same time as strategic leverage is used to finance a unique hedging design. Our positive carry hedge structure is comprised of a combination of merger arbitrage yield and index put option protection.

Within our hedge, merger arbitrage holdings are selected with short-duration (under six months), strong contractual protections and limited market correlation. The yields earned comfortably exceed the fund’s total financing costs, enabling us to also allocate a portion of the income generated toward acquiring S&P500 index put options. The put options serve two purposes: (1) they provide a material offset of the beta of the fund’s equity special situations holdings, and (2) they additionally protect against scenarios of merger arbitrage spread widening during broader market dislocation events.

Positive carry hedge protection is central to our philosophy. Meaningful drawdowns in financial markets often coincide with liquidity stress for fund investors – which, absent our form of structural defence, can otherwise result in a large gap between fund performance and average unit holder returns (independent research has estimated this gap to approach one fifth of fund returns)*.

By contrast our operating design has been built to fulfil a more rewarding long-term path: a fund aligned with unitholders, designed for consistent performance, high probability of success, structural integrity, and a hedge structure which whose attributes deliver long-term performance accretion rather than drag.

Our commitment to excellence

In April 2025, The Hedge Fund Journal named the GA-Courtenay Special Situations Fund the best-performing event-driven UCITS hedge fund over the trailing five-year period. The award reflects the effectiveness of our strategy, whose origins lay in event driven opportunities, to date. However, our focus remains forward-looking – and on continuous learning and improvement to further enhance unit holder outcomes.

My commitment is to excellence on behalf of our unitholders: within our equity special situations sleeve, we focus on attractively priced, high-quality companies with robust cash flows; and within our merger arbitrage allocations, strongly governed opportunities that reinforce the positive carry element of our hedge structure. The fund will not compromise this quality bias – we reject prospective allocations that prioritise cheapness over clarity of outcome, or that risk permanent capital impairment.

We also believe in transparency. Our website provides detailed insight into our investment philosophy, individual stock theses, and risk controls. It also hosts our research papers, investor letters, and quarterly webinars – all aimed at keeping our investors fully informed.

We look forward to hearing from you, and to providing a long-term home for your capital – a home defined by thoughtful stewardship and enduring performance.

Warm regards,
Adrian Courtenay

* Morningstar Research, Mind The Gap (August 2025) [link]