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.

Read Complete Article

Tags: absolute-returns, arbitrage, asset class, buying stocks, convertible-bonds, dollar terms, foreign currency, high-risk, india, investment destinations, investment-funds, offshore investment, private bank, real-estate, selling stocks

Greenwich Time – The Greenwich-based Viking hedge fund group run by Andreas Halvorsen started a new fund to focus on buying stocks after selling them short became more risky.

Viking Long Fund LP began trading last month after initially raising about $80 million, the firm said in a Jan. 15 filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Halvorsen, a former protege of hedge-fund manager Julian Robertson at Tiger Management LLC — making him a so-called "Tiger cub" — oversees about $9.5 billion at Viking Global Investors LP in Greenwich.

The new fund avoids selling stocks short, which is a departure from Viking’s long-short strategy of trying to make money regardless of the market’s direction. In an October letter to investors, Halvorsen said the scope for expansion is much greater for buying stocks than for selling them with the expectation of further drops.

Read Complete Article

Tags: buying stocks, expectation, fund-group, global-investors, greenwich time, halvorsen, hedge-fund-manager, julian robertson, money, scope, securities-and-exchange, securities-and-exchange-commission, selling stocks, tiger, tiger management, tiger-cub