(Bloomberg) -- Climate change, geopolitics and the huge popularity of artificial intelligence are driving Jain Global LLC’s strategy for investing in power, gas and commodities, said the firm’s founder Bobby Jain.

Speaking at the UBS Singapore Family Wealth Forum on Thursday, Jain provided a litany of reasons why his highly anticipated push into commodities would be a winner, from shifting European natural gas supply chains to changes in the weather.

Getting the commodities strategy right is critical for Jain, whose hedge fund is set to start trading in July. The firm has been hiring talent from trading houses and will allocate 15% to 20% of the roughly $5 billion it’s seeking to raise to investments in the space, Bloomberg reported last month.

“The climate is changing,” Jain said. “Solar and wind create volatility — they’re much more volatile than fossil fuels.” 

AI “is happening” regardless of whether it has use cases or not, he said. “There’s going to be a tremendous demand for power and that’s going to create a whole bunch of demand for commodities.”

With uncertainty surrounding everything from geopolitics and interest rates to the outlook for economic growth, volatility in those areas may translate into market opportunities that last for years, according to Jain.

“So relative value strategies should be good for a long time,” the former Millennium Management co-chief investment officer said. “Those are trends that could last 5, 10, 15 years.” 

Jain singled out the US, Europe, Australia and New Zealand as providing opportunities in gas and power trading.  

In addition to the energy market, Jain sees “big opportunities” in the equity long-short space, betting for or against the businesses that will win and lose from the rise of AI.

The comments were a rare opportunity to hear Jain promote his investment ideas after reports on the fund’s prospects emerged in recent months. His hedge fund had earlier sought to raise as much as $10 billion, according to people familiar with the matter.

In a room filled with some of UBS Group AG’s biggest family office clients, Jain signaled that the efforts to raise cash faced competition from private credit firms that have also attracted investors looking for alternative strategies.

Even so, Jain described the fundraising environment as “reasonable,” with many investors from the private wealth space underweight in alternatives — a sweeping category of finance that includes hedge funds.

Tech Hiring

One plus of launching now is that the rise of advanced technologies has helped him minimize back-office hiring. Improved access to data and better visualization tools have all been big productivity gains, according to Jain.

“We’ve probably had to hire 40% of the technology people we would’ve had to hire” three or four years ago, he said. Jain’s head of technology “did something on a blackboard, he took a picture of it and then he put it in the AI and 60% of the program was already built.”

Beyond hedge funds, Jain shared his views on US politics. Despite describing himself as a Democrat, he said there were fewer differences between Donald Trump and Joe Biden than many people thought. The election matters more “if you’re living in the Ukraine or you’re living in some geopolitical hotspot than in the Upper East Side of New York,” he said. 

New Yorkers who voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 are warming to Trump’s ideas, Jain said. 

“A lot of those people now are looking at Trump as more reasonable than they did before and they broadly think he was right on immigration, they broadly think he was right on Europe,” he said. “People don’t like ‘how’ he’s done things, but the ‘what’ has gotten a lot more traction in America.”

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