William Blair & Company, the employee-owned asset manager, has launched the William Blair Commodity Strategy Long/Short Fund, designed to give broad exposure to commodities while providing risk-adjusted returns with low correlations to traditional asset classes.

The actively managed fund employs a multi-manager approach, typically providing exposure to between six and 15 commodity trading strategies. The portfolio managers are John Abunassar, Peter Carl, D Trowbridge Elliman, Christopher Walvoord, and Brian Ziv.

Abunassar, Carl, Elliman, Walvoord and Ziv are members of William Blair's hedge fund-of-funds strategy team, the core of which has worked together for some 10 years - initially at Guidance Capital and now in their roles at William Blair. 

Specifically, the fund will be exposed to "three different styles of manager," who invest globally in hundreds of global futures contracts, said Michelle Seitz, head of investment management at the firm.

In December, William Blair launched a fund investing in equity securities of small to medium-sized companies. It had around $38 billion in assets under management at the end of September 2011.