The Sidra-Ancile Global Structured Trade Investment Fund has recently surpassed SR250 million ($66 million) under management to become the world's largest Islamic Structured Trade Investment Fund. The fund that is co-managed by Saudi-based Sidra Capital and Swiss-based INOKS Capital has made 135 short-term investments across a variety of geographies and soft commodities. “This is a major milestone for Sidra Capital and our partners INOKS Capital. The majority of the investors are from Saudi Arabia which shows that there is not only awareness but sufficient interest in structured trade finance in the Kingdom as an alternative to conventional investment vehicles,” said Hani Baothman, CEO of Sidra Capital. “All the investments of Sidra-Ancile were without defaults. This confirms the trend that trade finance is lower risk than many other types of financing and assets. It finance structured in a proper manner has a lower risk profile than many other types of financing and assets.” Structured Trade Finance is an alternative mean of providing trade-financing facility to SMEs to overcome the difficulty of obtaining financing due to their weak financial standing as per bank analysis. “We believe that it greatly benefits from this risk miss-perception arbitrage,” said Nabil Abdul-Massih, CEO of INOKS Capital. “The much needed growth capital it provides allows these real tangible non-speculative businesses to mature and in the process generate wealth for the investors and the invested communities. We view it as top tier to provide an investor with the comfort of a risk adverse investment because duly mitigated while generating both qualitative sustainable superior returns and quantitative pros like volatility absorption and absolute non-correlation to other assets.” “The strategy of the fund that invested across Africa, East Europe, Asia and MENA region is to support growth in the real economy by actively providing working capital to non-speculative value added SMEs focusing on agricultural commodities, energies and metals,” said Mohammad Currim Oozeer, Deputy CEO of Sidra Capital. “The Fund efficiently intervenes along the commodity value added chain by using an activist and innovative approach coupled with Shariah financing structures which are tailor made based on the specific transaction needs.” Sidra-Ancile has a non-leveraged approach which aims to generate consistent coupon like returns with low volatility, making it an attractive investment that enhances diversification in sources of returns and non-correlated to other traditional asset classes as well as alternative investments. Apart from being fully Shariah-compliant the fund sets high ethical standards. The implementation of strict SRI/ESG investment selection criteria is an integral part of the strategy through which it seeks to generate both economical and direct responsible positive impacts. The Sidra-Ancile has won the International Finance News Best Trade Finance Deal of the Year 2012, Best Islamic Structured Trade Finance 2013 by Asset Asian Awards and most recently the Most Innovative Deal of Year 2014 by International Finance News. — SG
