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.
Reuters – A hedge fund run by RAB Capital that invests in gold has fallen about 17.5 percent since the start of June, the group said, missing a large rise in the gold price because of bad bets.
The $35 million RAB Gold fund made the losses between June and August — a period in which the gold price dropped slightly — after taking out an interest rate swap on gold and shorting equities that continued to rise.
Reuters – Nick Bullman, who told Reuters he has this week placed bets on falling share prices, is concerned that government stimulus packages have not revived bank lending as much as hoped and that conditions remain as tough for companies as they did last year.
"The rally has been a ‘dash for trash’ based on speculation … On Wednesday (I) went short on the Standard and Poor (500) and financials via ETFs (exchange-traded funds)," he said in an interview on Friday.
Daily Telegraph – The funds collapsed as billions of dollars of bets made on mortgage-backed bonds and collateralised debt obligations (CDOs) unravelled, and when the time came to try to sell some of the funds’ sub-prime mortgages, no one wanted to buy them.
At the centre of those funds sat two men – hedge fund manager Ralph Cioffi and Matthew Tannin, the chief operating officer of Bear Stearns Asset Management (BSAM) – who were arrested a year later and charged with several counts of wire and securities fraud, following the loss of $1.4bn of investors’ money.
They face possible 20-year prison sentences, though both have consistently pleaded their innocence. The case against them will be set out at a trial slated to start in October. It centres on emails between the two – and with investors – in which both funds were referred to as "an awesome opportunity", despite allegations that both men knew of the problems within them.
Reuters UK – Hedge funds have increased their bets on a fall in voting shares in Europe’s biggest carmaker Volkswagen, according to data on Tuesday, despite the heavy losses suffered by such funds last year.
Hedge funds shorting VW were caught out in October when VW shares more than quadrupled after Porsche announced it had effective control of 74.1 percent of VW.
This left less than 6 percent tradeable in the market and saw funds scrambling to cover their positions.
The Associated Press – Shares of Bank of America shot up Thursday as a new executive at the bank, as well as a prominent hedge-fund manager, decided to place big bets on the company by buying up blocks of shares.
Shares jumped $1.07, or 6.7 percent, to close at $17.
Sallie Krawcheck, the former Citigroup Inc. executive hired last week as part of a management shake up at the Charlotte, N.C.-based bank, bought more than $1 million worth of the bank’s shares on Wednesday, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday.
Wall Street Journal – Jeffrey Gendell’s new hedge fund returned more than 25% during its first quarter, as bets on energy and a steady economic recovery paid off, according to a letter the manager sent recently to investors.
Gendell, who suffered big losses last year and is still winding down some old hedge funds, also criticized some of President Barack Obama’s policies and argued that political ”gridlock” could help equity markets in 2010.
The manager opened the new Tontine Total Return Fund in April after some of Tontine’s other funds lost more than 60% last year. The new fund, which focuses on more liquid, or easily tradable, securities, returned 25.3% in its first quarter after management fees, Gendell said in a July 20 letter to investors.
Bloomberg – Erik Verhaar, a former energy trader at Ospraie Management LLC and Deutsche Bank AG, started a hedge fund this week in the Netherlands as investors are returning to commodities.
His new Falckon Capital BV bets on U.K. natural gas and European power, emissions, coal and oil and has attracted one investor so far, Verhaar said yesterday in an interview.
Verhaar, 46, started at Cargill Inc. in 1987 as a cocoa trader and worked for Goldman Sachs Inc. and Nuon NV before joining Deutsche Bank in London in 2000, advancing to managing director for gas and power. He joined Ospraie’s biggest commodities fund in March 2008, six months before it closed in September last year. Verhaar’s energy investments at Ospraie gained 15 percent net of fees while he was there, he said.
Bloomberg – Most of the gains in Brazil’s currency and interest-rate futures markets this year are over, said Beny Parnes, chief strategist at BBM Gestao de Recursos Ltda., manager of Brazil’s top-performing hedge fund.
BBM pared back leveraged bets that yields on rate futures will fall and the real will strengthen after its Bahia 1 Fundo Investimento Multimercado jumped 86 percent this year, said Parnes. Bahia 1 has outperformed all 683 Brazilian hedge funds that manage more than 100 million reais ($53 million) as the central bank slashed the benchmark rate five times and the real surged 22 percent against the dollar.
Bloomberg – Marcos Duarte, co-founder of the $1 billion hedge fund Polo Capital Gestao de Fundos Ltda., is buying more Brazilian homebuilder shares even after the stocks more than doubled this year.
Duarte said the Rio de Janeiro-based firm is buying real estate developers Klabin Segall SA and EZ Tec Empreendimentos e Participacoes SA, adding to bets on the industry that helped his 659 million-real ($348 million) Polo Norte Multimercado LP fund outperform 96 percent of its peers in 2009.
Bloomberg – Darwin Capital Premier LS1 Fund, a hedge fund investing in Japanese stocks, has returned 31 percent since opening to investors in January as bets on companies including JP-Holdings Inc. and Daiken Medical Co. paid off.
The fund, advised by DarWin Capital Partners Ltd., began on Jan. 20 after running under a limited partnership structure since June 2006, according to Takafumi Sahoda, founding president of Darwin Capital in Tokyo. Prior to the January start, the strategy returned 224 percent in the 27 months through October 2008 compared with a 54 percent slide in the benchmark Nikkei 225 Stock Average in the same period, he said.
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.
Seeking Alpha – In a 13G filing made with the SEC due to activity on June 9th, 2009, Lone Pine Capital has disclosed a 7.7% ownership stake in Smithfield Foods (SFD). This is a brand new position for Stephen Mandel’s hedge fund and it now owns 11,116,850 shares. Lone Pine previously did not show a position in SFD when we looked at its entire portfolio, so it has just recently entered the position over the past 2 months or so. In terms of other big bets Lone Pine has made recently, we saw that Mandel likes Strayer Education. He presented this choice at the 2009 Ira Sohn Conference where numerous hedge fund managers each presented an investment idea.
His $7 Billion fund has returned over 25% annually since its inception in 1997, but had a rough year in 2008. The term ‘lone pine’ comes from Mandel’s days at Dartmouth College, where the school has a historical lone pine tree. He is well versed in the ways of finding undervalued companies and he typically likes to sniff out solid companies with good management that are trading below their intrinsic value. In Alpha’s 2009 hedge fund rankings list, Lone Pine was ranked 21st.
