Global Investors and Traders Growing Appetite for Chinese Futures – Gaining Access Via QFI

OP Investment Management (“OPIM”), one of Asia’s leading hedge fund platforms, RCM China Consulting (“RCMCC”), and GROW Investment Group (“GROW”), a leading China-focused institutional advisor, have jointly announced that they have entered a tri-party strategic joint venture. The purpose of the joint venture is to provide a one-stop China alternative investment solution. Recently, GROW’s localized product design offering has been added to OPIM’s and RCMCC’s joint platform to bring established PRC onshore strategies directly to institutional investors via managed accounts and direct market access.

The three firms have established investment and compliance infrastructure to deliver cross-border opportunities for offshore investors, to meet the demand for actively managed strategies for the Chinese mainland markets. The demand has increased significantly due to investor optimism for a rebound in the Chinese markets and appetite for actively managed strategies.

Alvin Fan, CEO of OPIM commented “With over 30 years’ experience in Greater China, OPIM is taking our award-winning structuring and incubation expertise to help build the most robust and scalable solutions through Hong Kong. It’s more than just a license. It’s about navigating the evolving regulatory space that comes with market liberalization. With the right ingredients and partners, professional investors can drive uncorrelated returns out of previously untouched markets, such as the commodities futures. PRC regulators recently released 41 new derivative products allowed to be traded by offshore investors via the Qualified Foreign Investor (QFI) license.”

“William’s (William Ma) track record of identifying alpha drivers and more importantly his bespoke approach to institutional due diligence speaks for itself. More importantly, these resonate with OPIM’s values and standards.”

William Ma, CIO of GROW, added, “With over 20 years of on-the-ground investment experience in the domestic China market over the cycles, we called the bottom months ago in early Nov 2022 with the “billion-dollar tweet” on the China market. Investors who partnered with us are well prepared to position themselves for the coming run. While the markets have rebounded 50%, we see entry opportunities still for actively managed strategies ranging from Convertible Bond strategies to Commodities Futures. Together with OPIM and RCMCC, we plan to build FoF/MoM product that will tap into the track record of well-established onshore managers who’ve fared well over this last bear cycle.”

Matthew Bradbard, Head of RCM China Consulting stated, “We’ve been working with onshore investors and Western strategies since 2018. We’ve identified talented managers both in onshore and offshore markets. Our trader network and investors are thrilled to get access, but we need to ensure scalability throughout the ecosystem. By this, I mean a strategy’s edge can be capacity constraint by markets but certainly not by structure.”

RCM China Consulting is led by Matthew Bradbard, with over 20 years of experience in the financial markets primarily in the exchanged traded futures space. Bradbard and his RCMCC team have developed an expertise on the Chinese markets through a subsidiary consulting & technology entity incorporated in Mainland China. The team has consulted with investors and traders about China access via WFOE, QFI and TRS programs. To date, nearly 1B RMB of Mainland capital has been invested by Chinese Capital partners, that utilize market signals and data analysis procured by RCMCC. Execution is also handled by RCMCC with their proprietary OMS that has been written to 4 Mainland China Independent software vendors thus far. Bradbard is confident that RCMCC and his team are facing extraordinary growth opportunities.