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 – Justin Klintberg, a former manager at Marble Bar Asset Management LLP, has started his own Asia- focused hedge fund to trade stocks affected by events such as rights issues, spinoffs, mergers and acquisitions.
Kima Capital Management Pty, named after the Greek word for wave, began investment July 3 and has the capacity to manage $250 million in the Pan Asian Long/Short Equity Fund, Klintberg, its 36-year-old chief investment officer, said in an interview from Melbourne yesterday.
Bloomberg – Justin Klintberg, a former manager at Marble Bar Asset Management LLP, has started his own Asia- focused hedge fund to trade stocks affected by events such as rights issues, spinoffs, mergers and acquisitions.
Kima Capital Management Pty, named after the Greek word for wave, began investment July 3 and has the capacity to manage $250 million in the Pan Asian Long/Short Equity Fund, Klintberg, its 36-year-old chief investment officer, said in an interview from Melbourne yesterday.
Bloomberg – Michael McCarty, former chief equity and options strategist at Meridian Equity Partners Inc. in New York, plans to start a hedge fund next month that will make bets on price discrepancies between similar exchange-traded funds.
McCarty, 49, said he is starting Differential Investment Partners LLC with Bret Rekas, 40, who helped oversee about $350 million at Somerset Asset Management LLC in Minneapolis.
Times Online – One of the most senior fund managers at Prudential has attacked hedge funds as selfish and devious and blasted derivatives as “the scourge of the modern age”.
Tom Dobell, who manages the £3 billion Recovery Fund for M&G, the insurer’s asset management unit, made the remarks in letters sent this month to the fund’s 100,000 investors.
The salvo came amid evidence that hedge funds are poised to deliver their best first-half returns in a decade, bouncing back from a disastrous spell last autumn.
Bloomberg – Sumitomo Trust Finance (H.K.) Ltd., the asset-management unit of Japan’s fifth-biggest bank, will start a new multi-strategy hedge fund that invests in Japanese stocks, index options, futures and credit-default swaps.
The Tactical Equity Concepts-Japan Fund, also called TEC- Japan, will start June 29 with 10 billion yen ($105 million) of seed money from parent Sumitomo Trust & Banking Co., said Kota Murakami, the Hong Kong-based head of Sumitomo Trust Finance’s investment management group. The fund aims to raise assets to as much as 60 billion yen over the next couple of years, he said.
Reuters – The current rebound in stock markets is a bear rally and could turn by September, according to hedge fund manager Hugh Hendry, who has recently cut exposure to agricultural stocks.
Hendry, who is partner and chief investment officer at Eclectica Asset Management, said that while stock markets have rallied in recent months on hopes for an economic upturn, developed economies are still heading for a 1930s-style depression.
"To date we are maintaining the profile of the economic contraction that we witnessed in the 1930s. Nothing as yet has changed that profile. It’s still a profile of concern to me," he told Reuters on the sidelines of the GAIM 2009 conference in Monaco.
New York Times – The managing director of a collapsed Chicago hedge fund, Lake Shore Asset Management, was indicted by a federal grand jury. Prosecutors say the director, Philip J. Baker, operated a $300 million fraud.
The 27-count indictment was unsealed on Monday, said Patrick J. Fitzgerald, a United States attorney, in a statement on Tuesday. An arrest warrant has been issued for Mr. Baker, but his whereabouts are unknown, Mr. Fitzgerald said.
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission accused Mr. Baker in a civil lawsuit last year of having defrauded at least 700 investors by hiding trading losses. The commission won court orders banning Lake Shore from commodities trading.
Mr. Baker said that Lake Shore had a long history of trading success, though it lost about $38 million from 2002 to 2007, according to the indictment.
MONACO (Reuters) – Former Insight Investment fund managers Patrick Armstrong and Ana Cukic-Armstrong have launched a new fund management business that will invest in a broad range of assets and seek to beat inflation.
The firm, Armstrong Investment Managers, will try to combine hedge fund-style flexibility with the liquidity and lower fees of traditional asset management. It will launch funds for retail, high net worth and pension fund investors at the end of the summer, Patrick Armstrong told Reuters on Tuesday.
The pair were co-heads of the multi-asset group at Insight Investment, now owned by Lloyds Banking Group. They ran around 1.2 billion pounds in assets including the Diversified Target Return fund, which over the past three years fell 2 percent, beating an average 11 percent fall among peer funds.
"We think there is a middle ground between traditional funds and hedge funds," Armstrong said. "Hedge funds have been opaque, illiquid and had very high charges."
SAIL Advisors, a Hong Kong-based fund of hedge funds operator, said on Monday it will take over the management of three ING (ING.AS) funds in a move that will see a senior ING executive join the Hong Kong firm.
Under a complex deal, SAIL will "sub-advise" three fund of hedge funds managed by New York-based ING Alternative Asset Management, raising the Hong Kong firm’s assets under management to $2.4 billion (1.46 billion pounds) from $1.7 billion previously.
Harold Yoon, chief investment officer and head of ING fund of hedge funds, will also join SAIL as CIO and be based in Hong Kong, while SAIL will set up an office in New York.
Reuters – UK asset manager Bramdean Alternatives named Petersfield Asset Management Limited on Tuesday, as the bidder to rival the proposal by property tycoon Vincent Tchenguiz’s investment vehicle, Elsina, to oust its current board.
Bramdean said in a statement that Petersfield Asset Management Limited, is beneficially owned by Nicola Horlick, who founded Bramdean Alternatives in 2005.
Reuters UK – Some hedge funds will leave the UK if draft new European law is not changed, said one manager present at a meeting this week with the Treasury, in which the industry expressed grave doubts about the rules.
Proposed new EU rules to force disclosure of leveraged positions and give regulators more control over borrowing levels could drive away managers, David Stewart, the head of Odey Asset Management, told Reuters in an interview.
"They’d have to (leave) in some cases. If you put in the leverage rules and (the fact) that Cayman funds couldn’t be sold into the EU, I don’t know how it operates," he told Reuters.
"There will be some people who go back to America."
Reuters – International Standard Asset Management, the hedge fund firm headed by former Man Group chief executive Stanley Fink, has hired former RAB Capital director Rod Barker to help build the business.
Barker, who resigned from RAB at the end of 2007 to become co-chief executive of Renaissance Investment Management, started at ISAM on Monday as a director and partner with responsibility for business development, ISAM said in a statement on Tuesday.
