ILS portfolio manager added to Pioneer Diversified High Income Trust

Specialist insurance-linked securities (ILS) portfolio manager Chin Liu has been added to the team managing another of Pioneer Investments closed-end fixed income funds, the Pioneer Diversified High Income Trust.

Liu, who has been with mutual and closed-end fund and asset manager Pioneer Investments since 2007, is a Vice President and Portfolio Manager specialising in insurance-linked securities (ILS), catastrophe bonds and event-linked bonds and collateralised reinsurance structures such as sidecars.

Liu is already responsible for managing ILS and reinsurance linked investments across a number of Pioneer’s fixed-income portfolios, including as one of the portfolio managers of the Pioneer ILS Interval Fund, which was the asset managers first dedicated ILS strategy.

Liu’s ILS related portfolio management activities include risk modeling, portfolio construction, and security selection, as well as ongoing quantitative investment analysis efforts, including ad hoc statistical and econometric analysis. Liu also researches and develops security-level and market-level econometric forecasting models, screening fair value tools for the government and corporate credit markets.

In becoming a portfolio manager for the Pioneer Diversified High Income Trust, a closed-end fixed income fund, Liu joins Andrew Feltus, Jonathan Sharkey, and Charles Melchreit, who have been Portfolio Managers of the fund since its inception in 2007.

The $209.7m Pioneer Diversified High Income Trust allocated around 17.22% of its assets to ILS, event-linked and catastrophe bonds at the end of August 2015, with a number of private ILS transactions and sidecar investments as well as 144A cat bond securities.

Pioneer Investments has over $1.6 billion in ILS and reinsurance linked assets across the fund’s and strategies that allocate to re/insurance-linked investments.

Also read:

– Pioneer ILS Interval Fund assets up 18% to $64.4m.