A new investment strategy is being launched by a macro firm that deliberately targets those financial instruments that are linked in various ways to inflation – now a stubborn fact of economic reality in much of the world.

There is a need for the investment world to understand “inflationistas.”

Investors have inflation very much on their minds, and it’s no wonder. A cluster of major central banks had their April meetings, with several such as the Federal Reserve, Bank of England and European Central Bank keeping rates unchanged, mindful of price pressures. Higher oil prices and other forces mean inflation is not going away soon. As recently as yesterday, US consumer price inflation rose 3.8 per cent in April on a year before, above consensus forecasts.

Wealth managers, including the family office segment, need to figure out how to surf the inflation wave as cleverly as possible so that they can earn returns and protect wealth, and hopefully grow it. 

A new “macro” firm, Forvm Global Investments LLC, is being launched to run a strategy that taps into the inflation trend. It is run by Dr Stefania Perrucci (ex-Morgan Stanley Investment Management, World Bank, Turner Investments, New Sky Capital) and a group of colleagues. Based in New York – and considering a European office in either London or Milan as the firm grows – Forvm Global Investments will launch with funds in the second quarter of 2026. There will be a master feeder fund structure in the Caymans for non-US investors and a domestic fund version for the US market.

While there are plenty of macro hedge funds that take inflation trends into account – such as the likely paths of interest rates, for example – there aren’t many that make inflation-linked assets (any asset whose value is sensitive to inflation) the center of their approach, Matthew Goldberg, Forvm’s CEO, told Family Wealth Report news service in a recent call. 

"Instead of playing rates and government bonds, we use nominal rates (government bonds) and real rates (inflation-linked government bonds) in cash and derivatives markets to express macro views or relative value implementations,” he said. 

Dr Perrucci, speaking to FWR on the same call, said investors have always had to take account of inflation, but for a long period of her financial career, the topic was a bit dull – in part because inflation was relatively muted in the 90s, up to, and for most of the post-GFC period. 

That changed after the pandemic. 

“Three years ago, I wrote a white paper saying the [inflation] environment is different and going to be different,” she said. Unlike the past several decades, we are now in an environment where supply shocks may become more common and thus inflation and other assets behave in a different way â€“ the latest dramas in the Gulf being a case in point.

“This is intrinsically a pro-inflation environment,” Dr Perrucci said. Trends such as deglobalization, tariffs and geopolitical conflicts create an environment which is more pro-inflation and where traditional monetary policy is less of a tool in combating it.

How it works
The strategy plays on structural inefficiencies and mis-pricings across nominal and real rates, break-even inflation in cash and derivatives markets across the US, UK, Europe, Japan and Australia. The strategy seeks to have a structurally low correlation to broad equity and fixed income indices.

Dr Perrucci said such “inflation markets” have structural supply/demand imbalances, because cash supply is de facto limited to governments – and it is in many cases decreasing. Both Canada and Germany have stopped issuance recently, while there is no natural supplier of inflation in swaps. Vice versa, demand from asset managers, insurers, and pension funds is bound to grow with their asset base, leaving the market to mediate such often unbalanced flows. 

Wealth interest
Goldberg said there had been a steady flow of international enquiries into Dr Perrucci’s ideas, but until the full capabilities around it could be created, those calls were turned down. “We got a tremendous number of in-bound enquiries,” he said. 

"A lot of single-family offices and wealth managers have meaningful capital to deploy and a lot of them are wrestling with the same question: where do you find genuine diversification today?" Goldberg said. "Many portfolios have become heavily weighted to private markets over the last decade, which has created a real concentration in illiquid exposure. A liquid strategy that we believe performs well in inflationary regimes is exactly what's missing from a lot of asset allocations we see. We ran and tested our models in the past two years and were pleased with the results it gave us,” he said. 

The team-building involved not just Goldberg – a former chief investment officer at Marchant and with a background in the family offices space – but also chief operating officer and financial officer Kevin Treacy (formerly at hedge fund group Fortress, and CFO on the asset management side of UBS/Credit Suisse), and head of trading Keith Price, formerly with several large banks in London and New York.

The partners at the firm “eat their own cooking” – 15 to 30 per cent of the capital at the strategy’s launch, dependent on initial launch size to the external market will come from the partners, and about 250 per cent of the capital coming in will be from family offices. One of the benefits of the strategy is that it is liquid and scalable, given the underlying size of the assets it operates in, Goldberg said. 

The strategy makes sense during times of geopolitical stress, as is the case now, he continued. 

“Correlations between stocks, bonds and gold are of course dynamic, but as we’ve seen since March, the natural hedging between the three that havs been readily relied upon for decades is not a silver bullet. If you combine changing correlations across asset classes and the overconcentration of privates in family office and UNHW portfolios, I would argue we have the perfect storm that would necessitate liquid alternatives in one’s portfolio,” he said.

The HFRI Macro (Total) Index has delivered total returns of 4.44 per cent as of end-March, versus the start of the year.

The firm added that because of the liquid nature of the instruments its strategy employs, it considered it essential to avoid mechanisms such as lockups and gates. There is a Founders Class for those investing alongside the firm at launch.