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.
Reuters – Malaysia is working on a plan to allow the creation of Islamic hedge funds.
"It is now in the developmental stage,” Goh Ching Yin, an executive director at the Securities Commission, was quoted as saying by Business Times newspaper.
"There’s no timeline, but we are making good progress.”
He said the plan could get off the ground next year, depending on market conditions.
Hedge funds’ bets on falling share prices have been blamed for contributing to the near-collapse of investment bank Bear Stearns, the demise of Lehman Brothers and for a sharp drop in financial stocks in general.
Reuters – Shares in BH Macro, a listed feeder fund to the Brevan Howard global macro fund, Europe’s biggest hedge fund with assets of $20 billion, have sunk to a 13 percent discount to net asset value as a wave of selling has swept through European financial markets.
The fund was down 2 percent at 1255 pence in afternoon trading. Earlier Tuesday, BH Macro reported in a regulatory filing that its NAV at the close of business on Oct 3 was 1411 pence per share.
"The whole sector has moved to quite considerable discounts," said Mark James, executive director at RBS. "BH Macro is trading on its widest ever discount."
BH Macro has about $1.6 billion in capital. It came to market in early 2006 to provide access to Brevan Howard’s global macro hedge fund, which was and has continued to be closed to new investors.
New York (HedgeCo.Net) – Philip Richards, head of hedge fund RAB Capital, is stepping down and will be replaced with Finance Director Stephen Couttie, according to a statement made by the company yesterday.
Richards ran the $1.4 billion Special Situations Fund, which received poor press and even worse returns when it lost millions thanks to the nationalization of Northern Rock in February.
Richards will still be employed by RAB, serving as an executive director while still managing the Global Mining and Resources funds, which holds assets of around $210 million. He made headlines recently with his controversial personal stake in Bahamas-based oil exploration company BPC, in which his Special Situations Fund along with Falkland Gold & Minerals facilitated a takeover bid that earned him a hefty paycheck.
RAB currently manages around $5.9 billion in assets, a sharp drop from the over $7 billion it managed in 2007.
Julie Scuderi Senior Editor for HedgeCo.Net Email: julie@hedgeco.net
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Bloomberg- Mitsubishi Asset Brains Co., an investment advisory firm of the Mitsubishi financial group, plans to start a fund of hedge funds as it seeks to invest in managers that can make money in falling markets.
The company aims to start advising a fund in the next “two- to-three years” with the aim of raising “several tens of billions of yen,” Akihiro Nishi, executive director at the Tokyo-based company’s investment advisory division, said in an interview in Tokyo. The company has hired a hedge fund manager who will start in August, he said.
Mitsubishi Asset Brains aims to tap growing demand for funds of hedge funds since the credit crunch that stemmed from U.S. subprime loan problems prompted investors to seek diversified investments to secure steady returns. The money managed by funds of hedge funds has grown more than 800 percent since 2003, according to Singapore-based research firm Eurekahedge.
Blayney Chronicle- Chris Cuffe cannot escape his tag as the $33 million man. But six years after the former head of Colonial First State left the funds manager with a notorious golden handshake, he is back in the business – only this time doing it for charity.
What is more, he has convinced 15 leading fund management companies also to work pro bono, potentially forgoing more than $1million a year in fees for a good cause.
Mr Cuffe, now executive director of the non-profit organisation Social Ventures Australia (SVA), set up the Third Link Growth Fund with two aims: to provide retirees and other investors with a high-growth investment fund and to contribute almost all the fees received from investors to SVA.
Mr Cuffe today announces the names of the fund managers he has chosen to work free, among them Goldman Sachs JBWere, Colonial First State, Perennial Investment Partners and Pengana Capital.
Bloomberg – Leopard Capital, which is setting up a $100 million private-equity fund to invest in Cambodia, said it’s competing to buy a stake in Acleda Bank Plc, the largest Cambodian bank.
“It’s the best-run bank, it’s clean and it has very good margins,” Thomas Hugger, executive director at Leopard Capital, said in an interview in Singapore today.
Leopard Capital is vying with other foreign investors that are seeking to invest in Cambodian companies after the economy grew at least 10 percent in the last four years. Acleda Bank, based in Phnom Penh, reported a 46 percent jump in net income to a record $9.7 million in 2007, according to its annual report.
“We have a lot of people sniffing around, ready to buy into us,” John Brinsden, vice chairman of Acleda Bank, said in an interview in Phnom Penh on June 18, declining to give details.
Acleda’s assets more than doubled to $473 million in 2007, from $223 million the previous year, according to its annual report. Loans almost doubled to $311 million, from $157 million over the same period. The bank had 204 offices across Cambodia at the end of last year.
FINalternatives- An Illinois pension fund official caught up in the trial of a prominent supporter of Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) may be joining a new hedge fund.
Jon Bauman, executive director of the $38.7 billion Teachers’ Retirement System of Illinois, is mulling a departure to join Abraham Lincoln Alternative Investments, which is set to launch its first fund of hedge funds in August. But Bauman sounds far from certain he’ll be leaving TRS, and the pension fund says he’ll be staying put for at least another year.
“The long and short of it is, I’m not ready to pull the trigger yet,” Bauman told Crain’s Chicago Business. “There are considerations on both the TRS and Abraham Lincoln sides of the situation that need to be worked out before I would resign this position and make the move over.”
