The desire to beat the broader market is probably as old as the stock markets themselves. Day after day portfolio managers around the globe seek to generate above-average returns – but only a very few succeed. Morningstar has just put 3,200 active funds under the microscope. Over a twelve-month period up to and including June 2025, only one in three managed to perform better than the respective passive benchmark. That makes the achievement of the Hawk-Eye World Index all the more remarkable. Tareno AG launched this actively managed portfolio of 60 to 100 liquid international equities in April 2023. The independent asset manager from Basel defined a clear goal: The Hawk-Eye World Index aims to outperform the global equity market over the long term with a comparable risk. So far, this strategy has paid off: by the end of September 2025, it had seen its value grow by 78% compared with the starting level. Relative to the equally weighted MSCI World Index, the Hawk-Eye World Index has thus achieved an outperformance of 39 percentage points.
Led by Tareno fund manager Manuel Schmedler (see interview), the initiators of the strategy believe that stock markets are driven by emotions and investor behaviour, which is why there are recurring patterns and trends. To identify them at an early stage, the managers apply a range of instruments. Alongside chart analysis, these include indicators of sentiment and quantitative models. In theory, the Hawk-Eye World Index has an available investment universe of around 10,000 companies. After applying exclusion criteria relating to stock liquidity and ESG principles, about 7,000 companies remain. The experts first comb through this pool of equities for clearly defined chart patterns. Generally this will highlight some 1,000 shares. The next step is to consider whether any positive seasonal effects are at play. For the 200 or so companies remaining after this filter, the portfolio management performs another scoring process in which current cooperation agreements and orders play just as much of a role as the market position of the particular company.
Tareno employs artificial intelligence in the selection process with the aim of learning and revealing the environment in which particular signals indicate the highest returns. For the shares that make it through the stringent selection process, the 50/10/40 rule for UCITS compliance is applied. This means that no more than 5% of the allocation can be invested in equities of a single company. This limit can rise to 10% as long as the total of all positions in the index that are weighted above 5% does not exceed 40%. Alongside the selection factors already outlined, the Hawk-Eye World Index applies clear exit rules. Losses are limited and profits taken countercyclically. This has enabled the portfolio to prove that it can weather turbulent phases on the stock market. Turnaround is rapid, with the average period for which an equity is held being just 90 days. At around 900 trades a year, the portfolio posts a high turnover of 500%.
In the first two and a half years or so since its launch, the Hawk-Eye World Index has identified a number of trends at an early stage. Relative to the benchmark (MSCI World Index), for example, the portfolio was already overweighting Japanese equities in early 2023. Around a year later the focus shifted to silver and gold mines, while in May 2025 the index increasingly concentrated on technology and AI companies. Recently stocks from the healthcare sector have been overweighted. Investors have a simple and cost-efficient way of adding this dynamic strategy to their portfolio, because Leonteq has issued a tracker certificate on the Hawk-Eye World Index. The open-end product is listed on the SIX, the Swiss stock market, and is freely tradeable. To minimise the issuer risk, it is collateralised. The costs of the Triparty Collateral Management (TCM) come to 0.15% p.a., while there is also a structuring fee of 0.25%. Tareno is paid by performance and receives 20% of the outperformance of the index over its benchmark. In short, this actively managed certificate gives investors an opportunity to profit from global trends early on. To this end, the “Hawk-Eye” seeks out shares that many funds do not have in their sights.
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