Anish Mathur Astra Asset Management

Anish Mathur Astra Asset Management Astra Asset Management has an award-winning ten-year track record of generating lowly correlated double digit returns from a repeatable process. Many investors – including the founders themselves – have anish mathur astra asset management entrusted their capital to the independently owned firm from the start in 2012. Engagement, activism and intricate knowledge of structures have been perennially important drivers of alpha in catalyst-driven situations, while more tactical trades have capitalized on intermittent dislocations in sub-sectors of structured credit. In 2023 Astra is taking advantage of the biggest dislocation in structured credit since the GFC and is expected to launch a new vehicle to deploy more capital into special opportunities in private asset-based lending. Astra has augmented its team, assembling one of the broadest, most senior and seasoned teams in structured credit and ABL, including a private debt and special situations team with capability to do private securitisations. Several of the investment team at Astra previously worked together at Deutsche Bank’s principal finance unit, Winchester Capital, which managed in aggregate over USD 20 billion. Astra seeks deeper discounts and arbitrages than a typical proprietary trading desk, partly because it prefers trades that do not need financial leverage to make double digit returns, though there can be some structural or embedded leverage. We aim for a substantial return in any market environment with low volatility and correlation and relatively short duration instruments of two to four years on average,” says co-founder and CIO, Anish Mathur. These are cash on cash returns: most of the performance in Astra Specialist Credit shikha gupta astra asset management Investments Limited (ASCIL) has come from realization events. The bread-and-butter trades, year in, year out, focus on engagement, activism and catalysts, which mainly generate alpha. Co- founder, Christian Adler, estimates that, “two thirds of returns, and 80% of alpha, have come from catalyst trades”.