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This is London – It also led many in the City to believe the Bank favours a weak currency, prompting a series of downbeat forecasts today. “I’m super bearish on the pound,” said Hans-Guenter Redeker, the London-based head of foreign exchange at BNP Paribas.
“The Bank of England has made it clear it can’t afford a stronger currency.” He forecast the pound would fall to $1.50 in 12 months.
John Taylor, chief executive of New York hedge fund FX Concepts, said sterling will “get crushed” and sink as low as $1.45 in the coming months.
“The fundamentals in the UK are certainly not pretty,” he said. “It’s a race for the least ugly of the candidates, and I would argue that the US is going to be the least ugly for a while.” Others were more upbeat and said the measures taken by the Bank and the Government to ease the slowdown will boost sterling. HSBC predicted the pound would rise to $1.75 by the end of next year — midway between the high of $2.12 in November 2007 and the low of $1.38 in March this year.
SearchDataCenter.com – A large, worldwide hedge fund company needed to reduce its server memory latency to keep investors from experiencing costly trading delays. It found the answer from the small Oregon-based software startup RNA Networks and is using their technology to replace aging Tibco software.
The hedge fund’s Unix group is in the process of standardizing on RNA Networks’ product, RNAmessenger, to replace Tibco software in all the company’s data centers, including those in New York City, London, Singapore and various colocation facilities. The company’s CTO, who wished to remain anonymous, hopes to complete the rollout over the next 12 months.
SearchDataCenter.com – A large, worldwide hedge fund company needed to reduce its server memory latency to keep investors from experiencing costly trading delays. It found the answer from the small Oregon-based software startup RNA Networks and, in the process, is now replacing aging Tibco software.
The hedge fund’sUnix group is in the process of standardizing on RNA Networks’ latest product, RNAcache, to replace Tibco software in all the company’s data centers, including those in New York City, London, Singapore and various colocation facilities. The company’s CTO, who wished to remain anonymous, hopes to complete the rollout over the next 12 months.
Hedge funds and financial institutions based in the Cayman Islands have been pulling their money out of Britain as they are hit by the credit crunch, according to figures from the Bank of England.
The low-tax regime and limited regulation of the Cayman Islands – with a population of 52,000 – has attracted 80% of the world’s $1.3tn (£790bn) hedge fund industry.
Those institutions have almost halved their deposits in UK banks over the past 12 months, from $356bn at the end of the first quarter in 2008, to $173bn at the end of March, Bank of England data shows. The drop in Cayman Islands’ deposits comes as hedge funds are being forced to return money to investors who have made big losses from the financial crisis. It also reflects fund losses from falling markets.
The outflow of funds from Britain puts the spotlight on hedge fund threats to abandon the UK because of higher taxes, tighter regulation and potential caps on executive pay and bonuses.
Opalesque – The Australian Fund Monitor (AFM) released last week its “March Absolute Return and Hedge Fund Review” report which showed that the strong rebound in equity markets both in Australia and overseas saw equity-based hedge funds managed in the region post not only their best returns this year, but for the past three years.
AFM took the results of all funds – including non-equity strategies such as Global Macro and Commodities, and including funds of funds, and found that all had posted the best result in March since the start of the Global Financial Crisis in 2007.
With the ASX posting an impressive rebound in March of over 7%, which continued in April, equity-based hedge funds (with 85% of funds results reported) returned 3.18%. Over the past 12 months, equity-based hedge funds returned a negative 13.20%, against the ASX 200 which lost 33.11% and the S&P500 which fell 39.68%.
Bloomberg – Companies with the most debt and lowest returns on assets are turning the biggest six-week rally in stocks since 1938 into a bloodbath for last year’s best- performing trading strategy.
Investors in so-called quantitative momentum funds — which speculate that the worst stocks in the past 12 months will continue to decline — have become this year’s biggest losers after banks and companies that rely on consumer spending surged. Quant momentum managers may have tumbled 27 percent this month in the U.S., the most since at least 1993, while those in Europe may have lost 20 percent in March and 24 percent in April, according to data compiled by JPMorgan Chase & Co.
Vancouver Sun – Prime Minister Stephen Harper won a key commitment for Canada at the G20 summit, getting world leaders to agree to extend for 12 months a pledge not to raise new trade barriers.
“The biggest single thing that could turn this recession into a very long, extended depression would be global protectionism,” Harper said in a television interview Wednesday. “In our recent budget in Canada, we actually lowered tariffs on imported machinery and equipment. It’s important that we start to see some initiatives push in the other direction, to push towards trade liberalization.”
West Palm Beach (HedgeCo.net) – There were fewer redemptions in February 2009,($11 billion) compared to January,($30 billion), according to preliminary reports from Eurekahedge, pointing towards the easing of redemption pressures for hedge funds in the future.
The Hedge Fund Index was down 0.5% in February suggesting another month of loss mitigation and strong relative outperformance – The S&P500 was down 11%.
Interestingly, Eurekahedge says, fund of funds managers (-0.2%), on average, have now outperformed hedge fund managers for the first two months of 2009 after 12 months of consecutive underperformance for 2008.
Latin American funds were the only ones to finish the month with decent gains (0.7%), as managers in the region were afforded opportunities with the weakening of most regional currencies against the US dollar, among other things during the month.
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