Avenue Capital Group today announced its Credit Strategies Fund achieved a total return of over 23 percent for its first year. Launched on June 1, 2012, the fund significantly outperformed the Barclays U.S. Corporate High‐Yield Index, which returned 14.82 percent, and the Credit Suisse Leveraged Loan Index, which returned 9.04 percent for the one-year period.
Morningstar ranked the fund in the top 1 percent among 616 funds in the high-yield bond category for the year. The high-yield bond category is defined as a fund with at least 65 percent of assets in bonds rated below BBB.
In the all-taxable bond classification, the institutional share class was third and the investor share class was fifth out of more than 4,000 funds for the one‐year period ended June 1, 2013.
The funds institutional share class achieved a total return of 23.98 percent and the investor share class achieved a return of 23.74 percent.
“We are very pleased with the performance of the Avenue Credit Strategies Fund during its first 12 months,” said Marc Lasry, the chairman and CEO of Avenue Capital Group. “We developed this opportunistic credit fund to provide total return to investors, and it is gratifying to see this important objective achieved over the past year.”
The fund is a registered open‐end investment company that seeks total return, primarily from capital appreciation, fees and interest income. The fund seeks to achieve its investment objective by opportunistically investing in a combination of high-yield bonds, senior secured bank loans and distressed debt instruments across U.S. and non‐U.S. issuers.
Jeffrey Gary, the fund’s senior portfolio manager, credits the funds success on its investment style and the investment teams extremely thorough research to identify investment opportunities where some others may not see as much value.
The investor share class trades under the symbol “ACSAX” and the institutional share class trades under the symbol ACSBX. As of June 11, 2013, assets under management were approximately $270 million.