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Reuters – Improving markets and a need to recoup 2008 losses will prompt investors to pour $50 billion (30 billion pounds) into hedge funds this year and slow redemptions, Barclays Capital said in a report on Tuesday.
More than 300 investors surveyed by Barclays’ prime brokerage unit reported stashing, on average, 14 percent of their portfolios in cash. Nearly 80 percent of these investors said they plan to start putting some of that cash back into hedge funds.
"In spite of dramatic changes in the investor landscape, certain investors were ready to deploy their cash balances aggressively once markets stabilized," Brian Reilly, a Barclays Capital managing director, said in a statement.
Tampa Bay Online – Some consider them good capitalists. Others see them as opportunists. Still others call them vultures.
Whatever the name, hedge fund investors likely will be major players in Florida real estate in the next few years, buying up mortgage notes — troubled or not — for a fraction of their original value.
Often, the funds are passive investors. But here in Sun City Center, Jim Biggins is fighting to protect his family business, Cypress Creek Assisted Living Residence, from a Greenwich, Conn.-based hedge fund called Silver Point Capital.
Chicago Sun-Times – Sears Holdings Corp. Chairman and hedge-fund guru Edward S. Lampert failed for the fourth year to make a list he once topped — the richest hedge-fund managers in the nation.
Lampert, who takes no salary from the Hoffman Estates-based Sears, is nowhere to be found on the list published Wednesday by Institutional Investor’s Alpha magazine. Lampert topped the list published in 2005, after pocketing a $1.02 billion salary in 2004 for his leadership of Greenwich, Conn.-based ESL Investments.
Bizjournals.com – After watching Sonesta International Hotels Corp. lose roughly 70 percent of its stock market value over the past 18 months, a Connecticut hedge fund has shed roughly a third of its holdings in the Massachusetts-based hotel operator.
In a recent regulatory filing, Mercury Real Estate Advisors, based in Greenwich, Conn., said it sold around 23,400 shares of Sonesta stock (Nasdaq: SNSTA) between Jan. 20 and Feb. 10, bringing its total ownership in the company to 206,048 shares. Those holdings equate to around 5.6 percent of Sonesta’s common stock outstanding.
Mercury’s ownership stake was more than 9 percent in mid 2007, when Sonesta’s stock traded above $30 a share. Sonesta’s stock opened Monday at $9.50 a share.
The Money Times – A U.S. House committee Thursday reviewed hedge funds, which the panel’s chair called "virtually unregulated."
Because they aren’t required to report on their holdings, leverage or strategies, "hedge funds are virtually unregulated," said Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. "Regulators aren’t even certain how many hedge funds exist or how much money they control."
That segment of the financial industry is "growing rapidly," Waxman said, adding he was concerned that hedge funds, as other financial sectors, could collapse.
