EUAN MUNROStandard Life Investments   www.standardlifeinvestments.com Euan Munro managed bond funds in Scottish Provident before joining Standard Life in 1995. He now heads up Standard Life Investment's Global Absolute Return Strategies (Gars) fund* team in Edinburgh.

What is your investment approach?

We’re targeting an absolute return with a low level of risk. Essentially we look for big, liquid investment strategies that we believe are going to make money for our clients.

We pursue macro views – such as the movement of currencies, interest rates and equity markets – rather than individual stock stories.

We presently have about 27 macro strategies in the fund. We’re expecting each of those strategies to work out over 18 months to three years, but we expect the fund to exhibit much shorter-term stability because not all of strategies these are correlated.

We think Gars is an appropriate fund for investors who don’t have a great tolerance for market volatility, and who have a belief that a skilled fund manager can manage their way through the marketplace.

How has your fund performed?

The target for the Gars fund is cash (six-month Euribor) plus 5 per cent.

Since it was launched in the UK in June 2006, the Gars fund has delivered on this target, producing a return of 8.69 per cent per annum, with about one-third of the risk associated with the equity market.

What is your outlook?

We’re not overtly bearish, but we’re not massively excited about growth potential either. We see very muted recovery out of the recession.

Because of that, we really like investment views that produce income, rather than trying to make capital gains from a rapid return to excessive risk-taking.

* The retail version of the Standard Life Gars fund was launched in Ireland in September 2008. It can be bought by retail investors through broker channels.

In conversation with Caroline Madden