About Us
Established in 2005 and based in Singapore, Arcane Capital Advisors Pte Ltd holds a Capital Markets Services License from the local financial regulator, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS). This allows us to conduct fund management and investment advisory activities. But we only serve accredited or institutional investors.​​
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We are completely independent. The founder of the company, Mr. Christofer Rathke, is a veteran of the Asian investment industry and he still acts as its CEO and CIO. Our company is owned by its managers who are also substantially invested the funds we manage. Through “skin in the game” we keep our own interests perfectly aligned with those of our investors.​​
While in the first years of our operation we managed advisory mandates related to Asian equities and renewable energy for several major European banks, from 2008 onwards we chose to focus exclusively on the management of our in-house fund products and the crafting of bespoke investment solutions for institutional investors.
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A major milestone in our history was the launch, in early 2009, of the Solar & Sustainable Energy Fund. For its best-in-class performance record, this fund twice won Lipper Fund Awards. As a Luxembourg registered UCITS fund this was also the first renewable-energy themed product of its kind to offer European investors a targeted exposure to the exponential growth of Asia’s nascent solar and wind energy industries. Over the years, however, the geographical and thematic scope of this fund broadened to include companies in all major global as well as many emerging markets which contribute to the energy transition.
Our second equities fund, the Arcane Green Metal Fund, we launched in 2024. As the first thematic investment product of its kind in Singapore, this fund targets investments in those segments of the mining industry which extract minerals that play a critical role in the global Energy Transition. Specifically, these include copper, lithium, silver, nickel, cobalt, graphite and rare earths. The Arcane Green Metal Fund takes the legal form of a Singapore Variable Capital Company (VCC) whose investors are effectively the company’s shareholders, with all the safeguards that apply to such companies under Singapore law.
Our Philosophy
Born out of decades of personal professional experience in the investment industry, both as “sell-side” analysts and “buy-side” portfolio managers, as well as our extensive study of financial and economic history, our investment philosophy revolves around two preferences. First, we believe in specialisation and the value of active management, and second, in the value of independent investment research. This sets us apart from the mainstream investment industry. Our relatively small size also confers on us a strategic advantage.
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In today’s increasingly commoditized investment landscape, passive investment strategies have come to dominate, whereby low-cost ETFs blindly track benchmark indices such as the MSCI-World or the S&P 500. While the advocates of such passive strategies can point to a large body of empirical research supporting the benefits of such an approach, we believe it has its limits. The underlying axiom of the efficient-market-theory, when carried to such extremes where ETFs account for more than half of all investment flows in the major stock markets, will ultimately undermine its own effectiveness. The paradox: the more “efficient” investors believe markets to be, the greater the “inefficiencies” which ultimately arise from this preference. As investors blindly allocate money into ETFs, the stocks they hold become over-valued while those which they omit (due to concerns like liquidity or smaller size) may paradoxically become better investments.
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Today most global financial asset classes -- US equities, large-cap tech stocks, global property, high-yield bonds, private equity, crypto etc. – display such elevated valuations that appear at the top of their historical ranges. This is the outcome of decades of increasingly irresponsible fiscal and monetary policies.
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Yet, on the other hand, many sectors in which investors are under-allocated show great potential and deep value. Amongst these we focus on the renewable energy sector and resource stocks other than fossil fuels. Through our specialisation and independent in-depth research we seek to generate for our investors stable and above-average risk-adjusted returns in the unfolding new era of technology disruption and decarbonisation.