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West Palm Beach (HedgeCo.Net) - BlackRock Inc. has just launched a $500 million fund of funds IPO to be traded on the London Stock Exchange.
The fund, Absolute Return Strategies, Ltd will aim to generate 6 percent over the 3-month London interbank offered rate each year, according to an article published in the Wall Street Journal.
Absolute Return Strategies will provide investors access to its $11 billion Appreciation Strategy of investing in pools of hedge funds, which it acquired last year as part of its purchase of Quellos Group LLC.
While there are restrictions as to who may invest in hedge funds in the United States, there are about 30 funds listed in London that are open to anyone who can buy shares. The Absolute Return Strategies fund would be among the largest listed.
BlackRock currently manages about $1.3 trillion across their equity, fixed income, cash management, alternative investment and real estate strategies.
Julie Scuderi Senior Editor for HedgeCo.Net Email: julie@hedgeco.net
West Palm Beach (HedgeCo.Net) - Vega Co. Ltd has offered to buy Singapore based apparel manufacturer Sing Lun Holdings Ltd for $87 million.
Vega Co, which is a wholly-owned subsidiary of The HSBC Private Equity Fund 6, is seeking to privatize Sing Lun, along with placing two of their shareholders on the board of directors. They have offered Sing Lun $0.46 per share, and 18% increase over their last closing price of $0.39.
Sing Lun manufactures and distributes apparel to stores such as Banana Republic, Ralph Lauren and Old Navy through their factories in Singapore, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, China and Cambodia. It’s founding shareholders, who currently have a 53% stake in the company, have agreed to sell their shares.
The HSBC Private Equity Fund 6 currently manages around $1.25 billion, and focuses on investments through China, South Korea and other parts of Asia.
Julie Scuderi Senior Editor for HedgeCo.Net Email: julie@hedgeco.net
Telegraph.co.uk - Marshall Wace, one of the City’s biggest hedge funds, is to continue pressing for a combination of the managed pubs businesses of Punch Taverns and Mitchells & Butlers despite last week’s withdrawal of a proposal to merge the two.
Marshall Wace is understood to have trimmed its 6 per cent shareholding in Punch, which has a portfolio of nearly 8,500 pubs, and increased its stake in M&B on Friday, according to people familiar with the hedge fund. The changes to its shareholdings are likely to be revealed in Stock Exchange announcements by both pub companies tomorrow.
Reuters - Hedge funds betting on the debt of troubled companies look set to feast after years of lean pickings in Asia Pacific as the global credit crunch tosses up a banquet of opportunities, industry players said on Monday.
Macro hedge fund managers, who bet on trends in currencies, interest rates and other assets, are also seen doing well amid the current global market turmoil, which has battered many hedge funds investing exclusively in stock markets.
Telegraph.co.uk- Even for the affluent residents of London’s Holland Park, the arrival in the area last year of Gerard Griffin, head of Tisbury Capital, was big news. Curtains twitched as a multi-million-pound refurbishment of his house began. Rather than buy furniture or even appoint an interior designer, Griffin and his wife Sarah commissioned top artists to produce original work specifically for their home.
Soon the Griffins boasted a dining-room chandelier by glass artist Deborah Thomas, two installations by potter-sculptor Edmund de Waal (including a complete room of more than 600 porcelain vessels), and an architectural version of a Morandi painting in the gallery by ceramist Julian Stair. It was, Mrs Griffin modestly told one visiting reporter, "simply an extension of collecting on a domestic scale".
To the neighbours, the house had been "hedged" - snapped up and spruced up by a rich hedge fund manager. These flash Wunderkinder are branching out, and surpassing toffs, lawyers and even footballers’ wives with their reputation for ostentatious opulence.
ReportonBusiness.com- Hedge fund manager Matthew MacIsaac was near the end of a pre-St. Patrick’s Day party blitz when he allegedly bought cocaine for a woman at a Toronto after-hours club.
Unfortunately for the 32-year-old executive at MM Asset Management Inc., one of Canada’s top-performing funds, the woman was an undercover cop.
On March 17, police said that Mr. MacIsaac, ranked among Canada’s most successful fund managers, had been charged with conspiracy to traffic cocaine.
He was among 33 people arrested after police raided a bar called the Comfort Zone at 4:30 a.m. on a Sunday.
LONDON- Reuters) Man Group, the world’s largest listed hedge fund company, will buy 50 percent of U.S. credit specialist fund manager Ore Hill, seizing on what it said was "significant opportunity" presented by the credit crisis.
Man said on Monday it would pay $195 million (98 million pounds) in cash from its existing resources and issue $40 million worth of new shares to help buy the stake in Ore Hill which is based in New York and has about $3 billion in funds under management.
"Ore Hill’s principals will invest the majority of the net proceeds received by them in a combination of Ore Hill funds and Man Group shares, in each case committed for five years," Man said in a statement.
Globe and Mail- Hedge funds that make money by speculating on the success of takeovers may be the next round of casualties in the industry, not because of bad bets but because of a lack of anything to bet on.
Bloomberg News is reporting Friday that Tisbury Capital Management LLP plans to close up shop and hand the money in its fund back to investors because of there aren’t enough takeovers to play to make the game of merger arbitrage worthwhile. The value of deals so far this year has dropped to a third of last year’s level.
Merger arbitrage is a stalwart of hedge fund strategy. It involves buying shares of companies that are being taken over to profit from the difference between the market price and the buyout price. During the merger boom, funds made big bucks as the era of easy money led to many bidding wars that drove up prices. (Remember Dofasco, Inco and Falconbridge?)
LONDON (Reuters)- Hedge fund firm Pentagon Capital said Thursday it suspended its funds because it expects the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) to file civil complaints against Chief Executive Lewis Chester.
Pentagon, which manages 1.1 billion pounds in assets in 17 funds, said it will close the Pentagon Sterling Multi-Strategy fund, the Pentagon High Performance fund and the Pentagon Investment Capital International fund.
The contents of the complaints are not known, Pentagon said in a statement on Thursday, but it believes they concern CEO Lewis Chester and a now dormant investment fund.
West Palm Beach (HedgeCo.Net) - Augustus Asset Managers of Britain have relaunched their quantitative currency hedge fund after some remodeling of it’s computer-driven strategy.
The Systematic Fund, which was originally launched on July 1 of last year, abruptly closed in November after experiencing losses fueled by the U.S. subprime mortgage meltdown.
The fund is currently being seeded, which means that it is not open to outside investors.
"It’s being road-tested. This is the second systematic fund we’ve launched in the last year. It’s a reworking of the first, as the first one did not work as well as we’d expected," said Augustus Chief Executive Tim Haywood.
Quantitative funds are unique in that they rely on computer models to make their bets. The systems are designed to locate and take advantage of tiny inefficiencies in the marketplace. Quantitative hedge funds also generally employ esoteric trading strategies, and often use derivatives, options and futures to achieve greater returns. However, the extreme volatility in the marketplace that resulted from the subprime mortgage mess, made a lot of quantitative funds plummet from their high uses of leverage.
The Augustus fund aims to predict future moves and generate large returns by observing the drivers of currency movements. Augustus manages about $13 billion in assets, with $1 billion of that tied up in hedge funds.
Julie Scuderi Senior Editor for HedgeCo.Net Email: julie@hedgeco.net
West Palm Beach (HedgeCo.Net)- Hedge fund manager Man Group plc announced that they are "extremely well placed to see continued strong growth."
In a statment regarding its close period for the year, Man said, "This is a very strong set of results, achieved through a period of significant market turmoil."
Funds under management have risen to around $75 billion and it is anticipated that profit for the year ending 31 March 2008 will be ahead of market expectations.
Man Group’s most recent fund launch, which starts trading 1 April, raised $1 billion and has been included in FUM of $75 billion for the year to 31 March 2008.
Peter Clarke, CEO of Man Group, said, "Strong sales momentum has been maintained with sales of $15.8 billion in the year. Good performance has added $5.3 billion to investor assets during a period when global markets were exceptionally volatile."
Guardian- Cheap mortgages may be getting more and more difficult to come by but housebuilding shares shook off worries about falling demand for new homes yesterday. Instead, investors preferred to concentrate on the possibility of takeovers in the sector.
One catalyst for this was the news that the activist hedge fund Toscafund had raised its stake in Redrow from 9.68% to 16.56% and doubled its shareholding in Taylor Wimpey to more than 10%.
Redrow rose 25.5p to 314.5p and Taylor added 10.75p to 187p as traders decided Tosca - run by the former banking analyst Martin Hughes - may have spotted hidden value in the sector. Redrow has been tipped as a target for larger rivals such as Taylor or Bellway.