Jose Pedreira, one of the founding partners of Forum and the firm’s Chief Investment Officer, entered the hedge fund business in 1996, when he helped set up Columbus Advisors, another emerging market hedge fund. After Columbus unwound its operations in 1999, he founded Forum Asset Management with Ray Bakhramov (Portfolio Manager) and Americo Da Corte (Head of Risk Management). The firm's flagship fund, the Forum Absolute Return Fund, was launched in September 1999. In 2005, the firm launched their gloabl macro strategy.  In 2007, the firm launched its two new most innovative products, the asset based lending strategy and their commodity strategy. 

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Forum has significant expertise in generating positive returns in a variety of asset classes in emerging markets including sovereign debt, credit and equities.  The principals of Forum have over 100 years of combined experience investing through the highly volatile markets of the 1980's and 1990's.  The partners and their investment team have experience navigating through numerous market cycles and various political and macro economic uphevals.



A key aspect that differentiates Forum from other emerging market managers is its ability to leverage its network of local alliances to identify and profit from niche investment opportunities where there exist inherent, exploitable market inefficiencies. Forum has strategic alliances for its ABL activities in Mexico, Venezuela, Peru, Argentina, Brazil and Colombia. Forum also has a strategic alliance for its Hard Assets strategy in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) and Eastern Europe.  Forum's approach is highly opportunistic and seeks to identify profitable situations across the emerging markets globally. Forum pursues high absolute returns in low-priced, under developed, and under-appreciated markets. Many of the opportunities take advantage of historically inefficient financing markets and capital allocation systems. 

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The strength of Forum's management team lies in its ability to identify unique opportunities in various emerging market asset classes in order to obtain absolute returns for its investors in any given market cycle. Forum's expertise is especially profitable during times of intense market volatility. Forum's portfolio managers utilize a top-down macroeconomic and bottom-up fundamental analysis to identify attractive risk-reward opportunities. Forum focuses on situations with extraordinary value and excellent risk/reward characteristics. The firm believes that the best investment opportunities often lie in niches where there are inherent inefficiencies to exploit. The portfolio managers place a high value on returns which are uncorrelated to the traditional markets. Forum leverages its extensive network of contacts and relationships developed over the two decades, its partners have been in investing in emerging markets. Our portfolio managers and analysts travel extensively and augment external information sources with our own local ones.

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Founding partner Americo Da Corte has implemented risk management controls and procedures on all funds.  The risk management platform is essential to Forum's ability to manage and profit from high volatility environments and market shocks. Forum performs meticulous due diligence and monitoring on all its investments. Significant drawdowns are avoided by keeping an eye on longer term horizons and macroeconomic fundamentals. Systemic risk is minimized by emphasizing top-down macro-economic analysis not only on a country by country basis but with a view towards linkages on a global scale. Forum seeks to create well diversified portfolios and consistently maintains significant short positions as portfolio insurance to protect principal and dampen NAV volatility. Overlapping risk management techniques including "margin of safety", stop losses, and dynamic hedging to protect the funds against high sigma events. Forum implements a more conservative Maximum Potential Loss (MPL)  methodology rather than VAR to sizing individual positions and monitoring portfolio risk. This constrains the downside of any one particular position in a worst case scenario and limits the impact on NAV. Although Forum's funds have the option to use leverage, the funds have historically not been leveraged, ensuring for more stable returns.  All investment decisions are reviewed by an investment committee and receive final approval from the Sr. Portfolio Manager and Risk Manager.