MSIM’s baffling $400m options splurge

At first glance, the Growth Portfolio mutual fund offered by Morgan Stanley Investment Management seems fairly straightforward, holding a selection of tech-heavy US stocks like Cloudflare, Doordash and Snowflake. But over the past five years, the nearly $10 billion-asset fund has also spent $150 million on something seemingly unrelated – a string of options to buy US dollar against the renminbi, which would only pay off if the Chinese currency collapsed in value.

It’s not an isolated strategy