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, 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 book targeting allocation to excellent companies across a range of market capitalisations, yet complemented by a positive carry hedge structure that combines merger arbitrage yield with index put option protection. This construction not only mitigates beta but also enhances absolute return characteristics, enabling the fund to perform across a wide range of market environments.

Whilst the identification of high-quality companies may appear straightforward, delivering material alpha in modern markets requires more than traditional frameworks. We retain classical filters – such as moat, intrinsic value, and capital discipline – but also apply proprietary first-principles tests derived from organisational science and evolutionary biology. These evaluate leadership calibre, workforce merit and coordination efficiency, division of labour, 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. This 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 typically maintains full equity deployment across our selected companies, while strategic leverage is reserved for financing a positive carry hedge structure: comprised of a combination of merger arbitrage yield and index put option protection.

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

Hedge protection is central to our philosophy. Meaningful drawdowns in financial markets often coincide with liquidity stress for fund investors – which, absent structural defence, can result in their crystallisation of losses at precisely the wrong time.

By contrast our operating design has been built to fulfil our mission: a fund aligned with unitholders, designed for consistent performance, robust downside protection, and high structural integrity.

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. While this result reflects the effectiveness of our strategy to date, our focus remains forward-looking – on continuous refinement of theory, structure, and execution systems to further enhance risk-adjusted returns.

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 sleeve, 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