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.
New York (HedgeCo.net) – Jean-Philippe Blochet has left Europe’s biggest hedge fund firm, Brevan Howard, Bloomberg reported today. “Following his return from sabbatical last year, Jean-Philippe Blochet has decided to cease to be an active member of Brevan Howard Asset Management LLP,” the firm said in a statement.
Blochet was co-founder of Brevan Howard and was part of the hedge fund firm’s macro team, focusing on currencies and interest rates.
Brevan Howard had $25.7 billion in assets under management as of September 2009, it returned more than 20% last year while the average hedge fund lost around 19%.
Also leaving Brevan Howard is UCITS fund manager Stephane Diederich, who was hired from Credit Suisse in 2007 to set up an alternative CDO (collateralized debt obligation) business, an area of the financial world that was hit hard by the credit crisis, Bloomberg reported.
Reuters – Internet auction and services company EBay Inc has reached a deal to sell its online telephony unit Skype to a group of private investors, the New York Times said, citing two people briefed on its plans.
Andreessen Horowitz, a new venture capital firm headed by the Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen, is likely to be among the investors in the group, the paper cited the people as saying.
London-based Index Ventures and Silver Lake Partners may also be involved in the deal, one of the people told the paper.
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.
NASDAQ – The pace of new European hedge fund launches has stalled this year after the industry’s dismal 2008 performance made investors unwilling to back new ventures.
Data provider EuroHedge Monday said just 47 funds started trading in the first six months of the year, the least in a decade and less than half the number in the same period of 2008. The new funds collectively raised $2.09 billion – a figure that in "normal" times might have been raised by one fund alone.
However, EuroHedge said there are signs the second half could be more fruitful, with several high-profile funds already started or in the pipeline. Those include Theleme, a global equities strategy being set up by Patrick Degorce, a co-founder of The Children’s Investment Fund who left to strike out on his own, and Gyldmark Liquid Macro Fund, a fund started by former BlueCrest Capital portfolio managers.
Salon – John R. Talbott is a former investment banker with Goldman Sachs and the author of "The 86 Biggest Lies on Wall Street," "Contagion," "Obamanomics," and "The Coming Crash in the Housing Market."
Simon Johnson, the former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), is the co-founder of the Baseline Scenario, a Web site tracking the ongoing financial crisis. He is one of the most visible public commentators on the ongoing financial crisis and its causes.
From June to July of 2009, Talbott and Johnson held an e-mail conversation on the following topic:
CNBC – Fortress Investment Group LLC has named former Fannie Mae CEO Daniel H. Mudd as its new CEO, effective Aug. 11.
Mudd, a Fortress board member, takes over for co-founder and majority shareholder Wesley Edens. Edens will remain with the alternative asset manager as co-chairman, a title he will share with Peter L. Briger.
Fortress said late Sunday that the personnel change will allow Edens, along with Briger, Michael Novogratz, Robert Kauffman and Randal Nardone, to concentrate on managing existing investments and finding new investment opportunities. The four executives will continue to own about 70 percent of the company.
Contra Costa Times – If you accept the adage that "all of life is high school," then one of the charms of Silicon Valley is its ability to turn nerds like Marc Andreessen or Mark Zuckerberg into star quarterbacks on the tech gridiron.
So it may not seem fair that former San Francisco 49ers star Steve Young — an actual quarterback, and a Hall-of-Famer to boot — didn’t just wind up as some broken-down jock somewhere telling stories about glory days. Not only has Young made a successful transition to football commentator on ESPN, but he’s quietly been a Silicon Valley player, too. He’s a co-founder of Northgate Capital, a "fund of funds" that invests in tech, and a former director of Foundry Networks.
NY Post – Clarium Capital Management, the hedge fund founded by PayPal co-founder and Facebook board member Peter Thiel, fell another 4.4 percent in June, The New York Post reported on Wednesday.
The fund’s total returns are down 6 percent this year, the paper said, adding Clarium’s assets under management have plummeted to $1.9 billion from $7.8 billion a year ago.
New York Times – Jean-Pierre Aguilar, a pioneer in hedge fund investing in Europe and chief executive and co-founder of Capital Fund Management, died in a gliding accident over the weekend, the company said in a letter to investors Sunday. He was 49.
The accident, which occurred late Saturday morning near the airport of Barcelonnette, a town in the French Alps about 12 miles, or 20 kilometers, from the Italian border, also killed Mr. Aguilar’s co-pilot, Michel Fache, 56, president of the local gliding club, according to the local newspaper La Provence.
CNN Money – AQR Capital Management LLC, among the world’s largest hedge fund managers, will introduce another hedge fund-style mutual fund next month, as it expands its reach beyond the biggest investors.
Greenwich, Connecticut-based AQR, a $20 billion firm led by former Goldman Sachs Group Inc star Cliff Asness, led a new wave of hedge funds marketing to the masses when it launched the AQR Diversified Arbitrage Fund in January.
"We, in about two weeks, expect to introduce a whole new series of style exposures for retail investors," AQR co-founder David Kabiller told Reuters in a rare interview.
Bloomberg – Hedge fund managers gathering in Monaco this week said they have work to do to regain investors’ confidence after the industry’s record losses last year.
“We have to prove as an industry that we can provide absolute returns again,” Pierre Lagrange, co-founder of hedge fund GLG Partners Inc., told some of the 750 delegates at the GAIM International hedge fund conference in Monte Carlo. “We have to show that in the next year or two we can strike back.”
Hedge funds tumbled 19 percent in 2008, the worst year since Chicago-based Hedge Fund Research Inc. began keeping records almost two decades ago, prompting investors to pull money, and funds to shut or impose limits on withdrawals. Funds have started to rebound this year, rising 9.4 percent through May, according to the HFRI Fund Weighted Composite Index.
Bloomberg – Flowering Tree Investment Management Pte, set up by the co-founder of New York-based Sansar Capital Management LLC, plans to grow its Asian equities hedge fund by about 20 times its starting capital within the next two years.
The Singapore-based fund made its first bets on rising and falling stocks in Asia outside Japan last month, starting with $12.5 million sourced from founding members, family and friends, founder Rajesh Sachdeva, 40, said in an interview yesterday. It will grow to $15 million to $16 million by July, and plans to reach $200 million to $300 million in two years.
