Timberland Investment Resources Introduces European Hedge Fund

On Monday the American forestry investment firm Timberland Investment Resources (TIR) has launched a European timber hedge fund to provide European investors access to asset strategies.

TIR will offer European high-net-worth investors access to the increasingly popular timber asset investments. The new London based subsidiary is still waiting for approval from the Financial Services Authority.

The fund received will invest in timber resources in Europe, the U.S. and Latin America.

“The forestry asset class is gaining prominence globally because of its history of outstanding performance and its demonstrated ability to serve as a portfolio diversifier and inflation hedge,” said Tom Johnson, Chairman of TIR-Europe and Founding Partner of TIR-USA.

“We intend to make these unique attributes more accessible to European investors by offering them investments designed to meet their long-term objectives.”

With over 50 years of investment management and corporate and investment banking experience between them, the new European subsidiary is headed by managing partners Hugh Humfrey and Gian Paolo Potsios, both formerly of Arch Financial Products, an investment management firm.

The founding of TIR-Europe proves to be timely because the ongoing instability within global financial markets has highlighted the benefits of investing in forestry.

Humfrey said, “Forestry-related investments have consistently demonstrated a strong capacity to provide portfolio diversification because their returns, historically, have been weakly correlated with the performance of equities, bonds and other financial assets.”

He added: “Forestry investments also offer excellent inflation hedging characteristics and have generated a long history of stable investment performance consisting of both current income and asset appreciation. As a result, the asset-class tends to offer a great deal of flexibility from both a tax and cash flow planning standpoint, which makes it very compelling given the prevailing market conditions.”