(Bloomberg) The hedge fund business ain’t what it used to be. For starters, a lot of funds in the industry forgot to hedge at crucial moments over the past decade, according to the men now running the $200 billion wealth management unit of Denmark’s biggest lender, Danske Bank A/S.
“If you look back over time, there are a lot of hedge funds that were really exposed to the market,” Anders Svennesen, the chief investment officer of Danske’s pension arm, Danica, who was recently made CIO at the bank’s wealth unit, said in an interview at his office outside Copenhagen. “A real hedge fund ought to be market neutral, but an awful lot of them have been riding the wave of falling rates and rising stock prices,” Svennesen said. He doesn’t see outsourcing to hedge funds as a model that suits his goals here and now.
