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.
Winton Capital Management Ltd., the U.K. hedge fund with $12 billion in assets, will start a new fund in Japan and hire staff in Hong Kong as it expands when rivals such as Citadel Investment Group LLC retreat from Asia.
The London-based firm is going to advise a new fund sold to Japanese retail investors through Mitsubishi UFJ Securities Co. that will track the performance of its flagship commodity trading adviser fund as it seeks a slice of the nation’s $15 trillion in personal savings.
Bloomberg – Signet Capital Management Ltd., a hedge fund investor that overseas about $2 billion, wrote down to zero an investment in Weavering Capital, the London-based hedge fund that filed for administration last week.
PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP is liquidating the $506 million Weavering Macro Fixed Income Fund after discovering the fund had $637 million in swap agreements with a company controlled by Magnus Peterson, the firm’s founder. That company “lacked the value to support the swaps,” PwC said.
Bloomberg – The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission extended a rule forcing hedge funds to tell the agency about short-sale positions amid concerns investors bet against companies after spreading false rumors they will fail.
Investment managers who oversee more than $100 million must to disclose to the SEC the stocks they’ve bet will fall in price until Aug. 1, the agency said in a statement on its Web site today. Those positions won’t be made public, the SEC said.
The SEC said it’s concerned “about the possible unnecessary or artificial price movements” in stocks “that may be based on unfounded rumors and may be exacerbated by short selling.”
The SEC is investigating hedge funds and cracking down on short-selling after lawmakers questioned whether traders spread misinformation and used abusive tactics to attack companies. The collapse of Bear Stearns Cos. in March and Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.’s September bankruptcy fueled concerns that investors were manipulating financial markets.
Boston Globe – US Representative Barney Frank yesterday staked out the next battlefront in the economic crisis gripping the world: more regulation of hedge funds, investment banks, and other financial institutions.
Frank, who heads the House Financial Services Committee, blamed a lack of strict oversight for the failures of Wall Street investment banks such as Bear Stearns Cos. and Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., as well as dozens of subprime mortgage companies. He said hedge fund investments in arcane securities based on those mortgages deepened the crisis, which has spread worldwide. In contrast, heavily regulated commercial banks escaped the crisis largely unscathed, Frank said.
"The cause of this problem was a lack of financial regulation in the industry," the Massachusetts Democrat said at a Newton City Hall press conference, one of two events he held in the Boston area yesterday. "If the regulated institutions had made loans, we would not be in the crisis we’re in."
Los Angeles Times- Wall Street regulators are examining whether securities firms adequately police rumor-mongering used to manipulate stocks after shares of Lehman Bros. Holdings Inc., Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac tumbled last week.
The Securities and Exchange Commission’s inspections unit; the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, which monitors brokerages; and the New York Stock Exchange’s regulatory arm are checking whether firms have controls in place to prevent the intentional spread of misinformation, the SEC said Sunday. The agencies also will look at whether employees have been adequately trained.
"The examinations we are undertaking with FINRA and NYSE Regulation are aimed at ensuring that investors continue to get reliable, accurate information about public companies," SEC Chairman Christopher Cox said.
Regulators already are hunting for traders who may have sought to profit illegally from the credit crisis by falsely stoking panics about the stability of such companies as Bear Stearns Cos., which collapsed in March amid speculation that clients were pulling out their business.
Bloomberg- Asian hedge funds are increasing their use of multiple prime brokers after the U.S. subprime mortgage market collapse heightened the risk of relying on a single investment bank for brokerage services, an AsiaHedge survey found.
Hedge funds that are managed in Asia or invest primarily in the region awarded 326 shared mandates to prime brokers, 36 percent more than last year, according to Bloomberg calculations based on information in AsiaHedge’s 2007 and 2008 Asian prime brokerage surveys. The pace of growth exceeded the less than 20 percent increase in sole mandates to 778 in the past year.
Rising delinquencies in the subprime market that led to the near collapse of Bear Stearns Cos., once among the top three Wall Street prime brokers, have forced the world’s largest banks and securities firms to post more than $400 billion of asset writedowns and credit losses since the beginning of last year.
Bloomberg- A year after Andrew Rabinowitz yanked his hedge fund’s cash from Bear Stearns Cos. because of concern the Wall Street firm wouldn’t make good on its trades, he’s ready to return.
For Rabinowitz’s New York-based Marathon Asset Management LLC, the lure is a prime brokerage that’s now part of JPMorgan Chase & Co., whose $1.6 trillion balance sheet is more than four times the size of Bear Stearns’s. JPMorgan Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon is counting on customers like Rabinowitz, some of whom helped bring Bear Stearns to its knees in March, to make his $1.36 billion takeover worthwhile.
After a run on Bear Stearns prompted a bailout by the Federal Reserve and the sale to New York-based JPMorgan, Dimon said one of Bear Stearns’s biggest attractions was its prime brokerage, which provides loans and processes trades for hedge funds. Bear Stearns lost as much as 40 percent of its so-called prime brokerage volume in the month after the March 16 acquisition.
Seattle Post- Incriminating messages allegedly sent by two ex-Bear Stearns Cos. hedge fund managers indicted on fraud charges that even sophisticated professionals disregard the dangers of putting sensitive information in e-mails, ex-prosecutors said.
Ralph Cioffi, 52, and Matthew Tannin, 46, were charged last week with misleading investors by saying two funds were thriving while knowing subprime-mortgage investments threatened their collapse. The indictments, the first relating to the subprime crisis, cited e-mails from both business and personal accounts describing looming problems. Investors in the funds ultimately lost $1.6 billion.
"It is pretty dumbfounding that people still use e-mail in such a casual way," said Carol Bruce, a former federal prosecutor now with law firm Bracewell & Giuliani in Washington. "But they do — and they will into the foreseeable future."
Bloomberg – Bear Stearns Cos. didn’t investigate the financial health of a hedge-fund client that later collapsed because its claim of an annual 20 percent return on investment “made perfect sense,” a former executive at the firm said.
Bear Stearns was sued in 2001 by a bankruptcy trustee on behalf of creditors of the now-defunct Manhattan Investment Fund Ltd. U.S. Trustee Helen Gredd alleged New York-based Bear Stearns was liable in part for $400 million in investor losses because it didn’t properly inspect the fund’s books, according to a complaint originally filed in a Manhattan bankruptcy court.
A senior Bear Stearns executive learned in 1998 that the fund was claiming a 20 percent return when the securities firm’s records showed a $190 million loss, the trustee said in court papers. The executive, Fred Schilling, was head of prime brokerage sales in 1998 when an investor in the hedge fund praised its returns to him at a cocktail party, he said.
“With the information I had, that Ernst & Young was a third-party administrator, and there were other prime brokers involved, it made perfect sense,” Schilling, referring to the New York-based auditor, testified today during a trial of the case in Manhattan federal court. The executive said he learned an affiliate of the accounting firm aggregated losses and gains from other parties to arrive at the final return rate.
Under U.S. bankruptcy law, if Gredd can prove the securities firm failed to diligently investigate the fund, she can recover around $141 million on behalf of creditors.
Bear Stearns spokeswoman Elizabeth Ventura declined to comment.
India Daily- The Bear Stearns Hedge Fund Managers are getting indicted for starting the credit crisis. According to media sources, Federal prosecutors are preparing to file criminal charges against managers of two Bear Stearns Cos. hedge funds whose collapse helped mark the start of the credit crisis. The U.S. Attorney’s office in Brooklyn is in the process of completing interviews of witnesses and other key people in the case this week, and has indicated to lawyers with interest in the case that indictments could be imminent.
The former Bear Stearns managers, Ralph Cioffi and Matthew Tannin, managed two high-profile bond portfolios for the securities firm’s asset-management unit. Bo doubt they aere one of the helpers in triggering the crisis. But are they really the root cause of the credit crisis?
The Wall Street Journal – A group of four law firms has filed additional investor arbitration claims against Bear Stearns Cos. and a fund manager alleging the firm was less than candid with investors in one of its hedge funds.
"Our investigation indicates that officials at Bear Stearns engaged in a concerted effort to conceal the true state of affairs at this hedge fund, for an extended period of time before it imploded and that the victims of this nefarious scheme included both individual investors and professional money managers from around the world," said Steven Caruso of Maddox Hargett & Caruso, one of the law firms.
The claims were filed with the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority on behalf of investors in Bear Stearns’ High Grade Structured Credit Strategies Fund. Last summer the fund failed along with the company’s High-Grade Credit Enhanced Leveraged Fund, costing investors $1.6 billion.
Reuters- Bear Stearns Cos plans to turn over documents to securities regulators showing that financial giants like Goldman Sachs Group, Citadel Investment Group and Paulson & Co cut their exposure to the securities firm before its collapse, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday.
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), as part of an inquiry into events surrounding the implosion of Bear Stearns in March, has sought and will examine these trading records, people familiar with the matter told the newspaper.
The SEC is expected to use the data to determine whether any trading activity was improperly coordinated, constituted manipulation or otherwise contributed to Bear Stearns’ collapse, the report said.
