Next month Max Gottschalk, a senior managing director and head of global marketing at alternatives manager Gottex Fund Management, will leave London and move his family and two black pugs, Henry and Grace, to Hong Kong. The move is just one of a handful of ways in which the Swiss firm – which began life a quarter of a century ago as a brokerage business, founded by Gottschalk’s father, Joachim – is using all the available tools to recover from a difficult time during the financial crisis.

As a listed company, Gottex was forced to play out in public many of the troubles that were endemic across the industry and other non-quoted funds of funds were able to address in private.