Minneapolis, Minn.-based KMK Capital Management is gearing up to launch a quantitative long/short strategy in the next few months.

The strategy focuses on a broad range of liquid securities and aims to capture spreads created by a systematic rotation among equity categories.

Its model ranks the style and size categories from strongest to weakest on a monthly basis and then puts on the appropriate long and short positions. Its long/short positions are optimized between a 90/10 to a 50/50 allocation, and the strategy employs a minimum of two exchange-traded funds representing between 200 and 400 stocks each.

KMK has been trading the strategy in-house and has produced returns of –2.95% this year through September. It was up 1.47% last month during the worst drawdown period for hedge funds in a decade.  

“During this short selling ban, one of the benefits of the strategy was that it was still allowed to short ETFs and still stay liquid,” said Douglas Moga, president. 

KMK is currently looking for seeders to kick start its fundraising process.