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.
Seeking Alpha – Very in-depth and analytical commentary out of Elliott Management in their recent second quarter 2009 letter to investors. The hedge fund has penned a 24 page letter covering topics of risk management, the automotive industry, regulation, distressed assets, arbitrage opportunities and much, much more. We highly recommend taking the time to peruse through this lengthy and informative hedge fund investor letter.
Elliott Management was founded by Paul Singer back in 1977 and managers over $12 billion today.
Reuters – Hedge funds stand to make gains from convertible bonds arbitrage again after last year’s huge losses decimated the sector, though improving markets have made the job more complicated.
Managers have been using a simple "buy and hold" strategy to ride a big bounce in depressed bond prices so far this year, enjoying gains of nearly 30 percent.
Bloomberg – John Meriwether, who roiled global markets when Long-Term Capital Management LP collapsed in 1998, plans to shut his current hedge fund, according to a person familiar with the matter.
JWM Partners LLC is closing its main Relative Value Opportunity II fund after losing 44 percent from September 2007 to February 2009. Meriwether, credited with generating billions of dollars of revenue at the former Salomon Brothers in the 1980s through so-called relative value trades, returned an average of 1.46 percent a year with his new fund since opening in 1999, compared with 2.4 percent for the Credit Suisse/Tremont Hedge Fixed-Income Arbitrage Index.
June 16 (Bloomberg) — Arvind Raghunathan , former head of Deutsche Bank AG’s global arbitrage business, will open his new hedge-fund firm next month with more than $1 billion, a sign that investors are trickling back after record losses last year.
Roc Capital Management LP’s assets will include $500 million in a separate account from Deutsche Bank, according to people familiar with the New York-based firm, who asked not to be identified because the information is private. It’s the largest hedge-fund startup this year, one of at least eight expected to raise more than $250 million each, according to brokers who provide credit and lend securities to managers.
The ventures are being set up by executives who left banks that scaled back trading to conserve capital, or hedge funds whose 2008 losses will limit bonuses for at least another year. Investors see them as an opportunity to get in early with the next George Soros or Paul Tudor Jones, who have outperformed rivals for most of their careers.
Reuters – U.S. securities regulators have about 150 active hedge fund investigations and more than 50 probes involving credit default swaps and other derivatives, Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Mary Schapiro said on Monday.
The SEC also has about two dozen active municipal securities investigations, possibly involving arbitrage-driven fraud, public corruption and price transparency, Schapiro told a conference of business journalists in Denver.
Financial Standard – US investors can now access a liquid and transparent hedge fund replication strategy after IndexIQ launched the IQ Hedge Multi-Strategy Tracker ETF on the New York Stock Exchange.
The New York based firm’s exchange traded fund (ETF) seeks to replicate the returns of the IQ Hedge Multi-Strategy Index before fees and expenses.
The index holds a range of hedge fund strategies including equity long/short, global macro, market neutral, event driven and fixed income arbitrage.
Business Standard – Hedge funds and foreign currency convertible bonds (FCCBs) are replacing real estate as popular offshore investment destinations for India’s richest.
Hedge funds are investment funds which employ various strategies to produce absolute returns. These strategies could be long- short, event driven, arbitrage or of various other types. A long-short strategy involves buying stocks which are assumed to perform high and selling stocks which are assumed to perform low.
As hedge funds are considered to be a high risk asset class, they are recommended to only a few “ultra high net worth and sophisticated” clients only. "Currently we are recommending 10-15 per cent allocation in strategies such as long -short and arbitrage to well-informed HNIs", said the head of a private bank. The returns range from 12-15 per cent annually in dollar terms.
Morningstar.ca – Hedge fund managers, once the swashbuckling frontiersmen of international finance and subject of fawning cocktail party banter, have quickly gone from hero to goat. As the global credit bubble burst with a vengeance in 2008, so too did the oft-touted myth that these alternative strategies could deliver positive results in any market.
But those claims painted the universe with too broad a brush. There has always been a difference between arbitrage funds that isolated structural inefficiencies, and speculators that either didn’t hedge or used the ability to short stock as a means of leveraging directional bets. Clearly it should never have been expected that a fund that was short financials and long commodities, as many hedge funds were last year, would have a market neutral, "absolute return" profile. The majority of Canadian offerings fall into that camp, so it’s no surprise we’ve seen stark declines among many of our homegrown funds.
Director of Finance online – Lyxor says their Hedge Fund Index was up 1.53% in January. Lyxor is an asset management group wholly-owned by Socieìteì Geìneìrale.
According to a report released today the top performing strategies over the month of January were Fixed Income Arbitrage (+4.19%), Special Situations (+4.08%) and CTAs Short Term (+3.30%).
New York (HedgeCo.Net) – Although hedge funds finished up 2008 with some of the worst numbers to date, they showed some signs of promise in December. According to the latest research by the Hennessee Group LLC, a New York-based advisor to hedge fund investors, hedge funds advanced .51 percent in December.
Hedge funds finished up the year down 19.15 percent according to the research. Although it was a dismal year for funds as a whole, they still outperformed the S & P, which was down 38.5 percent on the year, the Dow Jones, who dropped almost 34 percent, and the NASDAQ Composite Index, which posted a 40 percent drop on the year.
One challenge for hedge funds in 2008 was the record number of redemption requests brought on by clients. Large hedge funds such as Citadel, Harbinger and Cerberus, along with about 80 others, had to put some form of restrictions on client withdrawals.
“Year-end redemptions were significant, as the average fund returned 15% to 25% of investors’ assets. Combined with negative performance and complete liquidations, the entire hedge fund industry started 2009 at close to 50% of the capital it was at the beginning of 2008,” said Charles Gradante, Co-Founder of the Hennessee Group. “However, this should be a positive for funds as less capital will be chasing the same long/short trades, which should lead to better returns.”
The Hennessee Long/Short Equity Index saw a .31 percent advance in December, while the year to date was down over 18 percent. The Global/Macro Index rose .61 percent in December, although taking an almost 21 percent hit for the year. The Arbitrage/Event Driven Index, which was down 18.5 percent on the year, advanced 1 percent in December.
Julie Scuderi Senior Editor for HedgeCo.Net Email: julie@hedgeco.net
Forbes – The hedge fund sector has to date weathered market volitality better than the banking sector, since no large bellwether hedge fund has yet gone bankrupt. Nonetheless, hedge funds are expecting a wave of redemptions, as investors move to safer investments and reconsider their commitments to the sector.
Hedge fund sector resilience? Whereas banking sector difficulties have provoked a host of policy responses, including Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s now-moribund $700 billion bailout package–no hedge fund problem has yet necessitated a similar systemic response. The apparent resilience of the sector is particularly striking given that recent estimates suggest that the $2 trillion hedge fund industry accounts for approximately 30% of U.S. equity and bond trades (although volatile market conditions have led many managers to shift greater percentages of their holdings into cash-equivalents).
Reuters – Private equity firm Blackstone Group LP’s chief operating officer said on Tuesday that the limit on bank financing for leveraged buyouts was about $5 billion.
But COO Tony James said there were multiple opportunities to invest despite the market turmoil and the limit on financing, adding the company has had a very active 12 months, investing $8.7 billion in 27 deals since the credit meltdown.
"People say you can’t do leveraged buyouts," said James. "That’s not correct. We are getting bank financing for LBOs (leveraged buyouts), but we’re not getting bank financing for deals over about $5 billion in size."
He said the current volatile market conditions were ideal times for Blackstone to invest.
"One could be forgiven for thinking this is a hostile environment for Blackstone," said James, speaking at a Lehman Brothers conference that was webcast. "I don’t agree at all. I think it’s a fantastic environment. Turmoil, discontinuity in the market and scarce capital are absolutely ideal forces for our businesses."
Blackstone has taken part in some of the largest leveraged buyouts ever, such as the $23 billion purchase of Equity Office Properties Trust, but has also done numerous smaller buyouts.
