Active currency risk manager, The Cambridge Strategy, is to set up an office in Hong Kong and has appointed Sydney-based Alexandra Edstein to help expand the company's operations in the Asia-Pacific region.

With more than 20 years of experience in currency trading, Edstein joins the firm as a senior portfolio manager responsible for managing the firm's exposures through the Asian time zone.

She will be moving to Hong Kong to set up the firm's office there early next year.

Prior to joining The Cambridge Strategy, Edstein was a senior portfolio manager for Red Centre Capital, an Asian Macro Fund.

From 1995 to 2005, she worked for HSBC in Hong Kong in various roles including senior proprietary trader, trading Asian, G10 foreign exchange and interest rate markets.

She was chief trader for the Non-Deliverable Desk, Asian deliverable forwards desk, market making in THB and MYR forwards where, during the Asian financial crisis, she helped achieve record profits for the bank.

Before HSBC, she worked in the Australian interest rate markets for over a decade, primarily with BNZ, where she was the No.1 profit maker three years in a row.

Her appointment was announced shortly after the firm clinched its first ever Australian mandate.

"In these past few months, despite the financial markets meltdown, we have been welcomed in these markets…we believe that currency markets have inherent characteristics that can be exploited to capture alpha," said the group's chief executive Peter Henricks.

Alexandra is the third Australian to join the group. Henricks and Director of Marketing Derek Doupe are both Australian born and educated.