As part of our series looking at what firms did to win their accolades at the PP Investment Awards 2025, PP speaks to Sculptor executive managing director and global co-head of client partner group Adrian Colberg about winning the award.
What does it mean to win this award?
Sculptor is honoured to have won the 2025 Professional Pensions Investment Awards ‘Hedge Fund Manager of the Year' accolade, particularly given a key component of the evaluation criteria was fund performance.
Over three decades, Sculptor has sought to build meaningful relationships across the institutional investor landscape to continually refine our investment solutions to meet – and exceed – the goals of our clients. We have a long history of managing pension funds' assets globally which today represent around 45% of total assets under management. From a UK perspective, Sculptor has had longstanding presence in this marketplace with the establishment of a London office in 1998, which over time spearheaded the full build of local investment capabilities across asset classes; alongside a dedicated client servicing team covering UK and European-based clients. Against this backdrop, we greatly appreciate the award's recognition of Sculptor as a market leader of performance and innovation.
What do you believe sets you apart from your peers and contributes to this success?
With a 31-year track record of delivering strong risk adjusted returns and expertly navigating multiple market cycles through its flagship Multi-Strategy Fund, Sculptor distinguishes itself from peers through a disciplined investment process, a flexible and scalable platform, an investment culture of collaboration and a commitment to delivering tailored solutions that reflect the evolving needs of our clients. The Firm prides itself on forming true partnerships with its clients with a focus on transparency, humility and collaboration. Reflecting this today, 70% of the Firm's client partnerships exceed a decade.
Philosophically, our belief is that investment excellence is built not only on returns but on the integrity of the process that delivers them. This is coupled with a distinctive process that integrates deep fundamental bottom-up research, dynamic capital allocation and comprehensive risk management that utilises state of the art proprietary systems. This approach enables us to act swiftly on market dislocations while maintaining rigorous diligence and downside protection which is of vital importance when managing absolute return-seeking portfolios. Furthermore, we believe a single best ideas portfolio that is cultivated through team-based collaboration across strategies, alongside a senior leadership team that have worked together on average for 17 years, is a clear differentiator in the marketplace today.
What are the key challenges facing your pension scheme clients and how are you helping them address these issues?
In an environment where credit spreads are historically tight and equity markets are increasingly driven by a more concentrated set of factors, it can be challenging for pension schemes to identify diversifying alternatives that offer attractive absolute returns with low volatility. We believe our multi-strategy investment approach can help pension schemes during a de-risking or growth phase given the Fund's return profile and ability to take advantage of market dislocations.
The Sculptor multi-strategy fund is an absolute return seeking approach that includes five key strategies: merger arbitrage, convertible bond arbitrage, corporate credit, asset-based finance and fundamental equities. Our investment professionals collaboratively employ a fundamentally driven, bottom-up process that begins with rigorous research and idea generation. Every opportunity is thoroughly vetted, drawing on both in-house expertise and robust external networks, including industry relationships, alternative data, and quantitative tools. This disciplined process ensures that only the most compelling ideas are advanced, evaluated, and implemented, maintaining the integrity and rigor that underpin our investment philosophy. Furthermore, risk management remains central to our philosophy; our integrated risk management function allows investment professionals to focus on sourcing and underwriting high-quality investment ideas, while our dedicated risk team proactively monitors and adjusts exposures, especially during periods of market stress.
How will you continue to improve your services to pension scheme clients over the coming 12 months?
Sculptor will continue to advance its client services through collaboration, product innovation and offering thought leadership tailored to meet the evolving needs of our pension scheme clients.
We particularly pride ourselves on being thought partners to our clients, forming transparent and enduring relationships anchored in a genuine understanding of each client's objectives. Looking ahead, we remain committed to continually refining our client service model in order to deliver strategies and content that are closely attuned to our clients' goals; whilst ensuring our solutions remain relevant and impactful as markets evolve.
Furthermore, we remain steadfast in our commitment to product innovation that draws on our multi-decade experience across asset classes to develop solutions that address the changing priorities of pension schemes. Our responsiveness to client feedback is reflected in recent initiatives, such as the launch of new funds and customized partnerships, which demonstrate our ability to deliver bespoke solutions tailored to the evolving needs of our global investor base.
The winners of the 12th annual PP Investment Awards were announced at a reception in London on 19 November. To see the full list of winners and find out more about the awards, visit: www.investmentawards.co.uk
