The Sidra-Ancile Global Structured Trade Investment Fund has become the world’s largest Islamic Structured Trade Investment Fund, after recently surpassing SAR 250m ($66m) under management.

Hani Baothman, CEO of Sidra Capital, said: “This is a major milestone for Sidra Capital and our partners INOKS Capital. The majority of the investors are from the GCC which shows that there is not only awareness but sufficient interest in structured trade finance in the region as an alternative to conventional investment vehicles.”

The fund which is co-managed by Saudi-based Sidra Capital and Swiss-based INOKS Capital, has made 135 short term investments as to 2014 across a variety of geographies and soft commodities.

“All the investments of Sidra-Ancile were without defaults. This confirms the trend that trade finance is lower risk than many other types of financing and assets. It finance structured in a proper manner has a lower risk profile than many other types of financing and assets,” added Baothman.

Structured trade finance is an alternative mean of providing trade financing facility to SMEs to overcome the difficulty of obtaining financing due to their weak financial standing as per bank analysis.

Commenting on the strategy, Nabil Abdul-Massih, CEO of INOKS Capital, said: “The much needed growth capital it provides allows these real tangible non-speculative businesses to mature and in the process generate wealth for the investors and the invested communities.”

“We view it as top tier to provide an investor with the comfort of a risk adverse investment because duly mitigated while generating both qualitative sustainable superior returns and quantitative pros like volatility absorption and absolute non-correlation to other assets,” he said.

The fund invests across Africa, East Europe, Asia and MENA region to support growth in the real economy by actively providing working capital to non-speculative value added SMEs focusing on agricultural commodities, energies and metals.

Mohammad Currim Oozeer, Deputy CEO of Sidra Capital, said: “The Fund efficiently intervenes along the commodity value added chain by using an activist and innovative approach coupled with Shari’ah financing structures which are tailor made based on the specific transaction needs.”

Sidra-Ancile has a non-leveraged approach which aims to generate consistent coupon like returns with low volatility, making it an attractive investment that enhances diversification in sources of returns and non-correlated to other traditional asset classes as well as alternative investments.

Apart from being fully Shari’ah compliant, the fund sets high ethical standards.

The implementation of strict SRI/ESG investment selection criteria is an integral part of the strategy through which it seeks to generate both economical and direct responsible positive impacts.

Licensed by the Saudi Capital Market Authority (CMA) in 2009, Sidra Capital is a Shari’ah compliant financial services company located in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Sidra Capital currently manages assets worth approximately $400m (SAR 1.6bn) - all invested in alternative investments.