DHF started its fund management business, , in Hosingen, in the north of Luxembourg in 2020. It moved some of its operations recently to Silversquare, a coworking space in the capital’s Gare district to more easily access the talent pool.

The accounting, auditing and the legal departments are operated in Luxembourg. Its biggest office is in Vilnius, Lithuania, an important back-office centre for Nordic banks, where it hosts its KYC AML, custodian, banking operations.

DHF also has an office Dubai where it maintains its IT department to take advantage of the technology literate Asian expatriates, and another one in the Netherlands as the founders are “generally Dutch,” said Kooijman, during an interview on 13 June 2023.

A balanced return-risk approach

DHF manages between $60m and $80m in assets in three different funds. The largest fund, DHF Alpha Fund, contains a portfolio of US and European equities, AAA bonds and physical gold. The Alpha fund has had only positive returns for “almost four years in August,” said Kooijman, crediting a favourable asset mix.

The strategy of the DHF Gamma Fund is similar to the DHF Alpha Fund but aims at higher returns through higher leverage and exhibits more volatility. The DHF Forex Fund is a currency-only fund targeting corporate clients in the GCC region and is trading in all the major currencies. All DHF funds have a 30-days withdrawal notice period.

DHF uses the S&P500 as the benchmark for all its funds. Kooijman explains that clients tend to focus on their “three and a half track record” because, he admits, “[the benchmark] is not very comparable [to the fund strategies].” They distribute their funds largely to Dutch and Belgian clients as well as in the GCC region.

Through its securitisation firm, DHF Capital, the group offers bespoke currency solutions to its clients.

An expertise in gold

DHF has been active in the physical gold businesses for the last three to four years. It is sourcing, storing and buying its gold in Dubai. It uses its own in-house algorithmic forecasting models that it has refined over several years to actively trade physical gold and gold ETFs. “We really believe in the machine plus human knowledge […] we are only getting an alert from our models,” said Kooijman.

DHF does not use AI technologies for forecasting. “We would still have the human actually making the decision of entering the trade,” the CEO said.  

Kooijman explains that gold arrives in Dubai as dust or in small bricks from Africa and transformed into “investment gold.” DHF buys that gold and store in a vault with Transguard, a unit of Emirate Group, at the “international side” of the airport.

“We can ship it can fly it, we can send it to the client, or we can just store it […] or we can very quickly take it back into Dubai,” said Kooijman.