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.
Citywire.co.uk – The Serious Fraud Office (SFO) is to probe UK banks for evidence that complex financial products were mis-sold to consumers before the recession hit.
SFO director Richard Alderman plans to investigate the sale of complicated financial instruments like credit default swaps and collateralised debt obligations. The SFO has changed its tactics and will take a more active tack with investigations and will intervene to prevent future frauds, according to a report in The Times.
SFO staff are already investigating Madoff’s UK operations, hedge funds accused of over valuing securities, AIG UK and the collapse of Weavering Capital, according to The Times. The government has also asked its fraud taskforce to examine the collapse of MG Rover in 2005. And the workload is set to grow with the decision to look into the Keydata saga, as reported by Citywire this week.
Caribbean Net News – The UK Serious Fraud Office is investigating sales of credit-default swaps and structured-finance products, including collateralized debt obligations, prior to the credit crisis, following up an earlier investigation into a hedge fund and a related British Virgin Islands-registered company.
The SFO is looking into whether banks sold such products with flawed valuations, said Sam Jaffa, a spokesman for the government agency in London. No specific companies or credit rating agencies have been targeted under the investigation, he said.
“We’re looking generically at what might give us a cause for concern or a possible lead for finding out more,” Jaffa said in an e-mail Monday. “There’s no suggesting that across- the-board valuations were flawed. However, how valuations are arrived at, what is bundled into the funds and how they were sold are areas of interest.”
Bloomberg – The U.K. Serious Fraud Office is investigating sales of structured-finance products such as credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations prior to the global financial crisis.
The SFO is looking into whether banks that sold the products knew that valuations were flawed, SFO spokesman Sam Jaffa said today. Jaffa said no specific companies have been targeted as part of the investigation.
“It’s one of those red flag areas that we’re looking at,” Jaffa said.
The Washington Post – The Wall Street herd is at it again. Even as the cleanup crew is carting away the debris left by the last financial crisis, the investment banks, hedge funds and exchanges are busy working on the next one.
Forget collateralized-debt obligations and credit default swaps — the new new thing is high-frequency trading. In the last three years, this practice has boosted trading on the country’s stock exchanges by more than 150 percent, to the point where it now accounts for two-thirds of the daily trading volume.
Bloomberg – Sumitomo Trust Finance (H.K.) Ltd., the asset-management unit of Japan’s fifth-biggest bank, will start a new multi-strategy hedge fund that invests in Japanese stocks, index options, futures and credit-default swaps.
The Tactical Equity Concepts-Japan Fund, also called TEC- Japan, will start June 29 with 10 billion yen ($105 million) of seed money from parent Sumitomo Trust & Banking Co., said Kota Murakami, the Hong Kong-based head of Sumitomo Trust Finance’s investment management group. The fund aims to raise assets to as much as 60 billion yen over the next couple of years, he said.
Courthouse News Service – President Obama’s plan to overhaul financial regulations, to prevent a repeat of the country’s credit and banking catastrophe, is laid out in a "nearly final" 85-page document the president is expected to reveal today.
Among other things, the president proposes creating a National Bank Supervisor to oversee all federally chartered banks; strengthening capital requirements for banks; requiring hedge funds and other private pools of capital to register with the SEC; and regulating derivatives, including credit default swaps.
The plan would give the Federal Reserve more authority over large financial institutions that could threaten the financial system, and give the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. greater power to seize and break up such institutions.
The document proposes five "key objectives;" 1. Promote robust supervision and regulation of financial firms; 2. Establish comprehensive supervision and regulation of financial markets 3. Protect consumers and investors from financial abuse; 4. Improve tools for managing financial crises; and 5. Raise international regulatory standards and improve international cooperation.
The first objective of the plan calls for "new authority for the Federal Reserve to supervise all firms that could pose a threat to financial stability, even those that do not own banks."
West Palm Beach (HedgeCo.net) – Institutional brokerage and hedge fund services company BTIG LLC, announced the further expansion of its Global Fixed Income Group with four new hires.
The Global Fixed Income Group was launched in February of this year by Jon Bass, formerly of UBS, and John Purcell, formerly of Citigroup. The group focuses on sales and trading of credit products, which will cover the full credit spectrum from investment grade to distressed debt.
George Chalhoub has joined BTIG from Deutsche Bank where he ran the high yield proprietary portfolio on the high yield desk. Chalhoub spent 15 years in high yield research at Deutsche Bank, Merrill Lynch and Citigroup.
Mychal Harrison and Todd Sycoff have been hired as high yield traders in New York. Harrison joins BTIG from Barclays where he last traded high yield cash and credit default swaps. He began his career at Goldman Sachs in high yield syndicate before transitioning into high yield trading. Sycoff comes to BTIG from Bear Stearns where he was last on the buy side as the high yield portfolio manager in the asset management division. Prior to that, Sycoff spent 16 years on the trading desks of Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch as the head high yield trader.
Chris LeVine comes to BTIG from UBS where he was an executive director in the Fixed Income Sales Group focusing on investment grade and high yield credit. He will be in fixed income sales in BTIG’s New York office. Prior to UBS, LeVine worked at MarketAxess, Trading Edge and started his career at Morgan Stanley after Graduating Cornell University.
“We have been focused on expanding the firm’s capabilities in fixed income over the past few months and are excited to have George, Mychal, Todd and Chris join the group,” Jon Bass, Co-Head of Global Fixed Income, said. “Their combined experience will greatly enhance the efforts of our new division.”
“We have been able to attract top talent with deep institutional relationships and respected reputations on the Street that will help us better serve our clients in the fixed income area,” John Purcell, Co-Head of Global Fixed Income, said. “During the coming weeks, we expect to announce additional hires in fixed income as part of our overall plan to grow the group to 60 people globally this year.”
The Global Fixed Income Group was launched in February of this year by Bass, formerly of UBS, and Purcell, formerly of Citigroup, who together bring 50 years of fixed income experience to the BTIG team. The group focuses on sales and trading of credit products, which will cover the full credit spectrum from investment grade to distressed debt.
BTIG serves nearly 1,000 institutional customers and offers services from four divisions: Institutional Trading, Prime Brokerage, Outsource Trading and Direct Market Access. BTIG has offices in New York, San Francisco, Dallas, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Greenwich, Red Bank, Aspen and Orinda. The firm also has affiliates in London, Hong Kong and Sydney.
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West Palm Beach (HedgeCo.net) – Risk management expert, Dr. Stuart Turnbull, has been appointed as senior advisor to independent hedge fund technology provider GlobeOp’s Risk Services.
"Risk measurement, analytics and reporting are increasingly important to hedge funds and investors alike," said Tony Glickman, GlobeOp Financial Services head of Risk Services. "This presents GlobeOp with significant opportunities, as risk modeling is a core expertise and client service. Our clients can look forward to Stuart adding additional depth, creativity and pragmatism to the development of new GlobeOp risk models. They will also benefit from his expertise in transitioning theory to practical, efficient implementation."
Dr. Stuart M. Turnbull is the Bauer Chair Professor of Finance at the Bauer College of Business at the University of Houston, TX. He has authored more than 50 academic papers on financial economics, law and economics topics, as well as two books on derivatives. With Robert Jarrow he introduced the reduced form approach for pricing credit-risky assets. This approach was later extended to consider counterparty risk and credit rating transition matrices in risk management and pricing, and to the practical difficulties of credit default swaps valuation.
He currently serves as an associate editor of Mathematical Finance, the International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Finance and the Journal of Derivatives. Turnbull previously held executive positions in fixed income research at Lehman Brothers in New York and in risk management at the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce in Toronto, Ontario. He holds a Ph.D. in financial economics from the University of British Columbia, and an M.Sc. in statistics and operational research and a B.Sc. in physics from the Imperial College of Science and Technology in London, UK.
GlobeOp is listed on both the RiskTech 100 and FinTech 100 rankings of global risk and financial technology specialists.
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Bloomberg – Boaz Weinstein, the bond trader who lost more than $1 billion last year at Deutsche Bank AG, has raised about $160 million since the end of April for his new hedge fund, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Saba Capital Management LP, based in New York, plans to start trading in August, said a third person with knowledge of the firm. The people asked not to be identified because the information is private.
Saba, Hebrew for grandfather, was the name of the credit unit Weinstein started at Frankfurt-based Deutsche Bank in 2001. Weinstein, 35, lost money in 2008 after betting on bonds of companies such as Ford Motor Co. and hedging some of those wagers with credit-default swaps, contracts to protect against or speculate on default, people familiar with the matter said in January when the plans to start his own fund were made public.
24/7 Wall St. – According to a civil suit filed today by the Securities Exchange Commission in the Southern District Court of New York, John-Paul Rorech, a bond salesman at Deutsche Bank Securities, and Reanto Negrin, a former portfolio manager at hedge fund investment advisor Millennium Partners L.P., were charged with insider trading in credit default swaps of VNU N.V. VNU, now Nielsen Company, is a Dutch media conglomerate that owns Nielsen Media and other media businesses.
According to Scott W. Friestad, Deputy Director of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement, “This is the first insider trading enforcement action involving credit default swaps.”
Reuters – U.S. securities regulators have about 150 active hedge fund investigations and more than 50 probes involving credit default swaps and other derivatives, Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Mary Schapiro said on Monday.
The SEC also has about two dozen active municipal securities investigations, possibly involving arbitrage-driven fraud, public corruption and price transparency, Schapiro told a conference of business journalists in Denver.
West Palm Beach (HedgeCo.net) – OppenheimerFunds, Inc. and OppenheimerFunds Distributor, Inc. is being investigated by US law firm Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro for alleged violations of federal securities laws among other things on behalf of investors in the Core Bond Fund.
The "low-risk, conservative bond fund" that invested mainly in high-quality corporate bonds, is alleged to have started acting "like a hedge fund" taking extreme risks including selling risky credit default swaps and other high-risk derivative investments to Wall Street firms.
The Core Bond Fund suffered losses of more than 35% of its value in 2008 and continued to fall another 10% in the first three months of 2009. The Oppenheimer Champion income fund lost more than 80% of the its value, dropping almost $2 billion over the course of 15 months as a result of similar risky investments and deviations from the stated fund investment policy.
Hagens Berman is investigating whether officers and directors of the Core Bond Fund misled investors about the safety of the fund and whether they failed to adequately warn investors when the fund took extreme risks in violation of the Fund’s stated investment policy.
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