RBS hires buy-side veteran Emil Wolter as Asian equity strategist

The Royal Bank of Scotland Group has hired Emil Wolter as head of Asian regional equity strategy, based in Hong Kong, according to a release. Wolter, a veteran fund manager who has worked on the buy side for more than 10 years, joins from Polar Capital Partners.

At RBS he will report to Peter Hilton, who is head of Asian equity research.

"Unlike many strategists, [Wolter] has walked more than a mile in our clients' shoes and is particularly well placed to take our research product forward, and advise our clients on how best to position themselves to achieve their mandates in historically turbulent times," said Hilton in a written comment.

Wolter joined Polar Capital, a UK-based boutique fund management company with approximately $3.5 billion of assets under management, in September 2004 to launch its Asian ex-Japan fund. Aside from this long-only fund, he also managed an Asia-focused absolute-return hedge fund. Both these funds, and an Asian technology fund managed by a colleague, were closed down in early 2008 following what Polar Capital described as "unsatisfactory returns." The three funds had combined assets of about $194 million at the time they were closed.

In a comment to eFinancial News at the time of the closure, Polar Capital's finance director, John Mansell, noted that the Asia ex-Japan fund had been "a value fund in a momentum market", and while some investors said they would have liked the fund to stay open it had become uneconomical to run, and its performance meant that it would have taken 12 months before it could have raised money again.

Wolter stayed with Polar Capital after the closure -- according to eFinancial News to help run a hedge fund investing in global emerging markets.

According to the RBS release, Wolter built and grew the global emerging markets business at Polar Capital and was instrumental in opening an office in Singapore.

Before joining the UK firm, he was a senior investment manager at Pictet Asset Management, the institutional fund management arm of Switzerland's largest private bank. His primary responsibilities at Pictet, where he stayed for seven years, were to manage assets in Asian markets.

For a couple of years in the mid-1990s Wolter worked at Datastream International as an analyst in the pan-European markets.