Seeking Alpha – Britain’s Financial Services Authority (FSA) recently found that hedge fund leverage was nearly extinct (for now). In what is billed by the FT as the “only authoritative data on the opaque industry”, the FSA found that the average hedge fund had leverage of 1.15x, down from about 2x a year ago and 1.44x as late as last spring. According to the FT, the FSA defined leverage as long positions over NAV, “ignoring short positions.”

But what happens when you account for shorts? Regular readers may remember the chart below left from a recent European Central Bank report.

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Tags: authoritative data, european central bank, financial-services-authority, fsa, last-spring, leverage, seeking alpha

Financial Times – Hedge funds cut their borrowing to almost nothing in the wake of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, according to research by the City watchdog.

Data compiled by the Financial Services Authority show that leverage fell to just 1.15 times hedge fund net assets in October, down from almost twice a year earlier.

The survey, the only authoritative data on the opaque industry, also found that hedge funds had their highest level of "dry powder", or ability to borrow, since the research started in 2005.

However, prime brokers, the bankers who service hedge funds, say borrowing has fallen even further since the survey was carried out, and many hedge funds now have more assets than debt, or less than one times leverage.

"People are still holding quite a lot of cash," said Daniel Caplan, co-head of European prime brokerage at Deutsche Bank. "They are certainly not using the leverage that’s available to them."

The FSA carries out its survey of hedge fund exposure twice a year, and found leverage – measured as the proportion of total long positions to net assets, ignoring short positions – dropped from 1.44 times in April to 1.15 times in October.

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Tags: authoritative data, caplan, collapse, deutsche bank, financial times, financial-services-authority, fsa, lehman brothers, leverage, net assets, prime brokerage, prime-brokers, proportion, watchdog