Overview
Tycho Athos Event Driven Fund is an equity biased, event driven fund with a primary focus on short dated and liquid hard catalyst events in the Asia Pacific region and beyond. Athos Capital Limited was founded by Matthew Moskey and Fred Schulte Hillen, two seasoned event driven investors.
Strategy & Manager
Fund Strategy
Tycho Athos Event Driven Fund is an equity biased, event driven fund with a primary focus on short dated and liquid hard catalyst events in the Asia Pacific region, with the ability to invest a portion of the portfolio in global and softer catalyst event opportunities.
The founders have built up years of experience in the event driven space at both large multi national asset managers and Asian focused funds, and are industry veterans with M&A banking, special situations trading, and regional transactional, legal and operational skill sets.
The team’s core belief is that a unique, low volatility, and uncorrelated income stream can be extracted from Asian hard catalyst event situations, and that their strategy of nimble trading, individual trade structuring, and dynamic portfolio construction is ideally suited to crystalize superior returns from that opportunity set.
Investment Manager
The Athos Capital partnership combines individuals with broad and complementary event driven experience across M&A banking, special situations trading, as well as M&A legal and Asian operations. Since launch the team has consistently been nominated for industry awards, including for the HFM Best Long Term Event Driven Performance and Best Event Driven Manager awards, as well as the Eurekahedge Best Asian Event Driven Awards, with wins in 2014, 2015, 2018, and 2019.
Key Persons
Matthew Moskey - Principal and CIO
Matthew is a veteran portfolio manager in the Asian event driven space. Prior to co-founding Athos Capital in 2011 he was the portfolio manager for Tiresias Capital’s Omni Asia Fund, after being a portfolio manager for Centaurus Capital, where he opened the Hong Kong office and consistently generated superior returns for a dedicated Asia fund. He has in the past been responsible for event portfolios in excess of US$1 billion. Matthew’s background is as an M&A banker with Dresdner Kleinwort, where his core focus was around natural resources. His combination of fundamental M&A banking skills, strong network of contracts with corporates and bankers throughout the Asia Pacific region, and strong portfolio management experience form the basis of our portfolio construction process. Coupled with a superior and demonstrated risk management approach, Matthew has in the past produced superior returns while aggressively limiting downside during periods of market dislocation.
Fred Schulte-Hillen - Principal and Portfolio Manager
Fred has been overseeing portfolio management, risk analysis, and business building functions for event driven strategies since 2006 and is a veteran event driven and special situations portfolio manager in the Asia-Pacific context. Prior to co-founding Athos Capital in 2011 he oversaw the legal analysis, execution and trade structuring functions for an Asian event driven portfolio of over US$1 billion at Polygon Investment Partners, and then in the context of Black’s Link Capital, an Asian event driven manager he co-founded in 2009. Prior to working for hedge funds he was an M&A lawyer with Sullivan & Cromwell, running complex cross-boarder deals throughout the Asia-Pacific region. Fred’s focus is on portfolio management of core conviction hard catalyst event and special situations opportunities, as well as on the institutional quality of our business and risk management process.
Performance
Class Performance
Commentary
Investment Manager’s Commentary – June 2026
The second quarter of 2026 saw significant volatility across spread opportunities in the Fund’s relative value, merger arbitrage and share class arbitrage opportunities in particular, leading to significant trading opportunities and an overall more invested portfolio, albeit with much of that exposure still working towards realization. Our overall posture since the initial developments in the Middle East at the beginning of the quarter was to find conviction in short-dated and self-liquidating opportunities, while maintaining significant capital in reserve to deploy in the case of additional market sell-off periods given the wide spectrum of potential market risks and the short-term mispricing opportunities that this typically presents in Asian-biased arbitrage opportunities where we believe there is less permanently allocated arbitrage capital deployed, leading to short-term dislocations during volume-driven market repositioning. Separately, we continue to build significant conviction across several ECM opportunities in particular that we expect to perform in Q3.
Key performers in June included several ECM opportunities in Korea and Japan as well as a material A/H spread that we have been activity trading. Additional performance also came from a parent-subsidiary position. In addition, event positions surrounding the IPO of ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT), the world’s fourth-largest DRAM manufacturer, also contributed to performance. Positive performance was offset by a non-fungible ADR spread position that saw the spread widened during the month. This has been a top performer historically and we have increased exposure to this.
Looking forward, we continue to see a robust opportunity set in the second half from normalization in geopolitical uncertainty and interest rate expectations. Japan continues to be a core focus for the team as Japan’s banking industry and financial regulators are trying to expand the providers of LBO finance to better accommodate growing demand and avoid concentration of risks. Outside of M&A, in ECM, the landmark Alphabet equity raise and SpaceX IPO have taken the spotlight globally. The magnitude of these two deals, which launched in such close proximity, represents an extraordinary absorption of global ECM capacity from May to June. Nevertheless, the Asia IPO pipeline continues to be robust, with a potential listing of a memory chip giant that is on track to be China’s biggest IPO since 2022. The beginning of Q3 has already seen precedent-setting transactions of new Asian issuance to which the Fund had material exposure and we continue to believe that the Fund is positioned to outperform materially in this strategy relative to 2025. While we generated substantial gains from our IPO and listing-related event strategies, exposure to certain cash-rich companies where we are expecting material capital distributions underperformed over the quarter as capital broadly flowed toward the tech sector, with several positions seeing the discount of their stock prices to net cash continued to widen. The overall shareholder return yield reached high teens, and the discount of market cap to net cash exceeded 30% in one such opportunity, with the Fund increasing its exposure.
Documents
Contact
Registered Office of the ICAV:
35 Shelbourne Road
4th Floor
Ballsbridge, Dublin
D04 A4E0
Ireland
Dealing Contact:
Tycho ICAV
Attention: TA Department
c/o Société Générale Securities Services
SGSS (Ireland) Limited
3rd Floor, IFSC House
IFSC
Dublin 1, Ireland
T: 00353 1 6750 300
F: 00353 1 6750 351
E: [email protected]
Tycho Contact
Georg Reutter
Partner
T: +44(0)20 3384 8794
E: [email protected]
JJ Jardine-Paterson
Head of Investment Solutions
T: +44 (0)20 3598 6445
E: [email protected]
