Rauf Ashraf

Emerging Hedge Fund Manager Rauf Ashraf Diversifies to Distressed Opportunities

The Minister of Legal Affairs of Trinidad and Tobago has recently announced a future partnership with world famous entertainer and musician Akon. The Minister Taylor expressed his gratitude towards Mr. Rauf Ashraf who had played a pivotal role in making the collaboration a reality as he has also done in the past with Akon and his performances with Peter and Warren Buffet.

The most successful investors and hedge fund managers specialize in identifying lucrative opportunities where others see none, or where others fear to tread. Such opportunities are sometimes found in the often harrowing arena of Distressed Firm investing. Some famous success stories of other hedge fund manager’s such as Eddie Lampert have seen huge returns from their investment in firms like Kmart which have also been shining examples in the distressed arena.

Rauf Ashraf, identified by Goldman Sachs as a rising star and recommended by the former Fidelity Investment’s $60 billion dollar Magellan Fund Manager, and has been featured in numerous industry publications including Hedge Fund Alert to MARS Hedge Fund Newsletter. He has worked in the hedge fund business for ten years. Having been in the top 1% of manager's raising sizable capital in their first year, he managed a diversified long/short US-based strategy fund with peak assets above $50 million during the first year. His strategy has recently included distressed investments. Prior to that he was an Analyst with Essex Investment Management where he supported both institutional long only funds in addition to the firm's hedge funds with assets in excess of $5 billion. Between 1997 and 2001 he was at one of the largest private equity firms where he was a founding team member for the $1 billion-plus Greenberg-Summit Partners hedge fund started by Fidelity Investment's second largest fund manager (Larry Greenberg) and a leading venture capital firm (Summit Partners). He started his professional career as an Analyst at one of the largest firms on Wall Street, Fidelity Investments where in addition to working with Larry Greenberg (managed $20 billion) he helped to formulate and automate Magellan ($57 billion) fund manager's custom research templates with his respective stock selection criteria.

Industry press credit's him with interacting with over 1000 different CEO's and CFO's of publicly traded companies around the world where he modeled out future earnings which along with this proprietary  screening systems seems to be key to his investment methodology.  Industry press material used to substantiate this article also include the following:
 
Analyst Developing Quantitative Fund
An analyst whose resume includes positions at Essex Investment Management, Greenberg-Summit Partners and mutual-fund heavyweight Fidelity Investments is preparing his own hedge fund.
Rauf Ashraf expects to start trading the entity, called Empyrean Fund, with about $25 million on March 1. He’ll run the long/short vehicle — which combines quantitative and fundamental-analysis strategies with a bottom-up stock-picking approach — via his Boston firm, Ash Capital. Ashraf expects about 75% of his investment ideas to spring from quantitative research. Ashraf points to his experience at Fidelity as the genesis of his approach. Beginning in 1995, he helped the managers of several mutual funds there — including the giant Magellan fund — automate their stock-picking screens and research strategies. Two years later, he left with manager Larry Greenberg to help open Boston-based Greenberg-Summit, which eventually managed more than $1 billion. He covered more than 1,000 companies at Greenberg-Summit, honing his fundamental- analysis and quantitative skills. Ashraf spent the last year as an analyst at Essex, a Boston firm that manages more than $5 billion of hedge funds and long-only vehicles. Empyrean Fund will charge fees equal to 2% of assets and 20% of profits. The minimum investment requirement is $250,000.❖ Hedge Fund Alert, Feb 19.

Boston Start-Up Seeks Non-US Money
A start-up manager in Boston recently launched a non-U.S. version of his long/short vehicle, which has generatedlarge returns during its first four months of trading. Rauf Ashraf, who has worked at a few high-profile investment shops, started trading his Ash Master Offshore Fund late last month with $25 million. The vehicle mimics Ashraf ’s $22 million Ash Master Fund, a quantitative- and fundamental-analysis vehicle that earned a 29% return between its April 10 inception and the end of August. Ashraf is also beefing up the investment team at his firm, Ash Capital Management. Generalist stock picker Larry Green joined earlier this month from Maple Row, a now-defunct hedge-fund operation in Rowayton, Conn. Ashraf learned the basics of quantitative analysis in the mid-1990s at Fidelity Investments, where he worked to automate the research and stock-picking methods for vehicles including the giant Magellan Fund. After that, he helped Larry Greenberg open Greenberg-Summit Partners, a Boston hedgefund firm that eventually grew to more than $1 billion.
Before opening Ash Capital, Ashraf spent a year at Essex Investment Management, which runs more than $5 billion of long-only and hedge-fund assets. Ash Master Fund was called Empyrean Fund before Ashraf renamed it earlier this year.❖ Hedge Fund Alert, Sept 24.