Forbes - Major Wall Street firms placed large bets against Morgan Stanley using credit-default swaps, two days after Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc sought bankruptcy protection, the Wall Street Journal said, citing trading records.
The firms included Merrill Lynch & Co, Citigroup Inc, Deutsche Bank AG and UBS AG, according to the paper.
The paper said that […]

Bloomberg - Money manager John Paulson has started buying beaten-up mortgage bonds as hedge funds stumbled for a fifth straight month.
Paulson, 52, is purchasing debt backed by home loans after generating sixfold returns last year with help from bets against subprime mortgages, investors in his funds said. Paulson’s Advantage Plus fund rose 29 percent this […]

Reuters - Malaysia is working on a plan to allow the creation of Islamic hedge funds.
"It is now in the developmental stage,” Goh Ching Yin, an executive director at the Securities Commission, was quoted as saying by Business Times newspaper.
"There’s no timeline, but we are making good progress.”
He said the plan could get off the […]

Reuters - Hedge funds using technical indicators are likely to fare better in the next two years than those purely basing their strategy on economic fundamentals, a survey of around 200 investors showed on Wednesday.
The survey of asset managers, institutions, and high net worth investors at the Global Alternative Investment Management (GAIM) Fund of […]

International Herald Tribune - Hedge fund managers usually shun the spotlight. But five of them, billionaires all, are about to come under the glare on Capitol Hill.
The money managers — Philip Falcone, Kenneth Griffin, John Paulson, James Simons and George Soros — have been called by a House panel to discuss some of their trade secrets […]

Reuters - Several hedge funds with assets frozen at Lehman Brothers may have been hit by wrong-way bets on Volkswagen, industry executives said, possibly hurting funds on trades they cannot close.
While no money has yet been demanded by the prime brokerage unit of Lehman — which filed for bankruptcy protection in September — a fund […]

Time - Benjamin Graham was well prepared for the Crash of 1929. The now legendary investor had hedged his bets: he would buy preferred stock in a company and sell short common stock in the same company. When stocks crashed in October 1929, common shares fell much faster than preferreds, and Graham made a lot […]

Telegraph.co.uk - EU data shows that Philip Falcone, the US hedge fund baron who led the assault on HBOS, has sold short €138m (£108m) of Banco Popular’s shares, or 1.65pc of the total float, through his fund Harbinger Capital.
He has short bets of €208m on […]

Bloomberg - Harry Tyser, manager of the $100 million New Star Firefly Hedge Fund in London, was still trading while being wheeled into the operating room for kidney- stone surgery.
“It’s life and death out there right now,” said Tyser, 40, who used his mobile phone to call in sales before his July procedure. “You need […]

Bloomberg - Tantallon Capital, founded by Merrill Lynch & Co. former head of sales Nicholas Harbinson, closed one of its hedge funds after bad bets on Asian stocks, three people familiar with the matter said.
The Singapore-based firm shut its Tantallon Smaller Companies Fund, managed by Steve Sun, after it lost 25.6 percent this year, according […]

New York Times Blogs - Turns out hedge funds will not have to publicly disclose their secret strategies after all, at least not any time soon.
The reprieve for the industry came late Wednesday. The Securities and Exchange Commission quietly said it would relent on an emergency order, first issued Sept. 19, that would have required […]

Bloomberg - Carl Icahn, the investor angling to sell a 13 percent stake in Imclone Systems Inc. for more than $800 million, is piling up bets in the biotechnology industry.
Icahn and hedge funds he manages have accumulated stakes in at least 10 biotechnology companies that make up a fifth of the investors’ total publicly reported […]