LSA Equities

Libra Smart Alpha Equities offers discretionary portfolio management based entirely on the institutional-grade and award-winning European Best Ideas of Libra Investment Services (LIS). Libra owns and operates Apollo®, a smart alpha solution for active institutional equity managers, first created in 2004. LIS and LSA are closely aligned and have identical ownership structures. However, LSA has been incorporated as an entirely separate legal entity. It has independent operational structures and compliance oversight. To this end, LSA Equities is an Appointed Representative of Frank Investments, an independent investment management firm that is authorized and regulated by the FCA and acts as Investment Manager to the managed accounts. Conceived as a methodology with which to aggregate equity valuations within a multi-asset investment process, Apollo then spent 13 years being sold as a stock-, sector- and market-level valuation process to some of the largest institutional equity managers. As a consequence of proven successes in alpha capture and a changing regulatory landscape, Apollo was increasingly used as a complete investment system. The European Best Ideas have been produced since 2013 and, in that period, have achieved an impressive and consistent hit rate of 60% - a key statistic when the strategy is a portfolio of best ideas. The ideas have been submitted to alpha capture programs (broker idea ranking platforms run by asset managers), where the efficacy has been independently quantified. This provides our ‘paper’ track record. By winning an award in 2015 from Man Group / AHL, one of the biggest hedge funds in Europe, Apollo has earned a place among the top institutional investment advisory processes. The result of the paper track record was the catalyst for an investment to develop a real-money track record. Once it was proved that the real-money track record was entirely consistent, the decision to incorporate LSA was taken.