Each business day HedgeCo.Net keeps you informed with the top hedge fund industry news, opinion and insight from around the globe. From the latest hedge fund launches, to the impact of regulation, competition, and investor activism - we track the topics and people that make a difference to you.
Bloomberg – Rogers Investment Advisors Y.K., a Tokyo-based hedge-fund advisory firm, said it hired Rory Kennedy, Yuka Watanabe and Masayo Fukushima as it prepares to start its second fund investing in Asia.
New York-based Wolver Hill, advised by Rogers Investment, plans to start a private-equity fund with initial capital of as much as $30 million, according to Ed Rogers, chief executive officer of Rogers Investment. The fund, which will start on Nov. 1, would be the company’s first non-Japan fund and aims to have maximum capacity of $250 million, Rogers said.
Bloomberg – Let’s say you hand a million dollars or more to an investment advisory firm that boasts a sterling reputation, grand results and a promise to thoroughly investigate hedge funds before recommending them.
For all the claims of super due diligence, this fine firm sinks your money into what turns out to be a Ponzi scheme.
Now your money is gone and the hedge fund founder who lost it is serving 20 more than years. Federal regulators belatedly find that your adviser didn’t actually do that much due diligence.
The Bayou Group hedge fund it put you into hadn’t had an independent audit almost since its beginning when an initial auditor noticed consistent losses and was let go, according to the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Bloomberg – Alphex Investments Co., the adviser to Japan’s first short-biased hedge fund, plans to sell exporters’ shares, wagering they’ll fall on a rising yen and weak global economy, boosting the fund that started in March.
“What we’re seeing right now is nothing more than a bear- market rally,” Ichiro Takamatsu, 44, chief executive officer of the Tokyo-based hedge fund advisory firm, said in an interview yesterday. “We’re going to see a really bad yen rally this year, and that will create an opportunity to profit on exporters.”
The firm started its ASB Opportunity Fund on March 3 with $25 million of seed funding from a New York fund-of-funds seeking to diversify its portfolio, said Takamatsu. The ASB fund, with a net short position at all times, is the first of its kind in Japan, he said.
StarTribune.com – Score a big one for Target Corp. provocateur William Ackman.
The activist shareholder got a boost from the business world’s most influential proxy advisory firm on Tuesday, when RiskMetrics Group said that investors should vote for Ackman and one of his dissident nominees on an expanded Target board of directors.
Meanwhile, another proxy-research firm, Glass Lewis, endorsed the Minneapolis-based retailers’ full slate of incumbents.
American Chronicle – An investment professional from Greenwich with more than 20 years of experience is going out on his own by starting a Stamford-based advisory firm for small- to medium-size companies from here to
Texas.
Peter Schweinfurth, a former senior executive at Avenue Capital, a hedge fund based in New York City and London, recently launched Gulf + Eastern to offer restructuring, turnaround and mergers-and-acquisitions advice for small but growing family-owned firms focused on consumer products and the service sector.
CNN Money – For years, U.S. hedge fund managers have worried that their loosely regulated and secretive industry would one day face tougher regulations.
Now that day seems to be here.
"It was inevitable that this would happen," said Brad Alford, founder of Alpha Capital Management, an advisory firm that invests in hedge funds. "From the time Congress had the industry’s top hedge fund managers testify late last year, we knew something was coming."
West Palm Beach (HedgeCo.net) – As investors look to independent and unbiased hedge fund risk due diligence, Pelorus Advisors has decided to launch an operational risk management service for hedge fund investors. Unlike other due diligence firms, Pelorus only offers its risk due diligence service to hedge fund investors.
“It’s an enormous conflict of interest for diligence teams to be compensated by the same hedge funds they cover,” said Jeff Rathgeber, co-founder and partner of Pelorus. “The hedge fund community has seen more than enough target-sponsored ‘independent’ report cards. We’ll let other risk management firms issue their seals of approval based on manager-supplied data.”
Pelorus is staffed by a team of hedge fund experts that have spent years operating inside complicated hedge fund structures. “It is only from this vantage point that an advisory firm gains the experience needed to identify the true risks that hide within hedge funds,” said Ken McGee, Managing Director of Pelorus’ Hedge Fund Practice Group. “It is exactly this kind of experience that is missing from most hedge fund due diligence firms. In our opinion, this lack of inside experience is what moves most firms away from being Hedge Fund Risk Experts and moves them into the category of Data Regression Analysts.”
“A clear distinction that separates Pelorus Advisors from other firms is that we don’t harvest massive amounts of publicly available data, crunch it, and issue armchair reports to investors,” said Rathgeber. “Nor do we merely rely on data that is supplied by the target hedge funds we audit. Instead, we conduct in-depth, on-site engagements to dig deep into a hedge fund’s operations and run through its control structure to ensure that our clients’ investments are properly protected.”
HedgeCo.Net is a premier hedge fund database and community for qualified and accredited investors only. Membership on www.hedgeco.net is FREE and EASY. We also offer FREE LISTINGS for Hedge Funds!
