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 Times – Two weeks from now, a seven-year-old hedge fund called Alson Capital Partners will return around $800 million to its investors, and shut its doors for good.
The fund was founded and managed by Neil Barsky, 51, a former Wall Street Journal reporter-turned-Morgan Stanley analyst, who started his first hedge fund in 1998, just as the “hedge fund decade” was gaining steam. He was an old-fashioned stock picker who ran Alson Capital as a classic “long-short” stock fund, meaning that he bought companies he thought had good long-term prospects, while shorting companies he thought were likely to fall off the cliff. At its peak, Alson Capital had $3.5 billion under management, charged a 1.5 percent management fee, took 20 percent of the profits, and, when you include Mr. Barsky’s predecessor fund, produced compounded annualized returns of 12.11 percent a year. It’s fair to say he’s made a pretty penny.
Bloomberg – Aozora Bank Ltd., the Japanese lender controlled by Cerberus Capital Management LP, posted its first loss in a decade, after investments in U.S. lender GMAC LLC and Bernard Madoff soured.
The bank booked a 242.6 billion yen ($2.5 billion) deficit in the year ended March 31, compared with a profit of 5.93 billion yen a year earlier, it said in a statement today. It lost 35.8 billion yen on U.S. auto financing company GMAC.
Aozora, rescued by Japan’s government during the 1990s banking crisis, has pledged to focus on domestic lending after racking up losses in the U.S. Chief Executive Officer Brian Prince, who replaced Federico Sacasa on Feb. 10 when the bank forecast a loss, declined to comment on reports he merge the company with Shinsei Bank Ltd.
Bloomberg – Assets owned by hedge funds including borrowings may have fallen by 75 percent to a decade- low, with less competition paving the way for better returns, said Blaine Tomlinson, chairman of Financial Risk Management Ltd.
The total book size of assets owned by hedge funds may have declined to $2 trillion, from $8 trillion, he said at the GaimAsia 2009 hedge fund conference in Hong Kong today, reducing the industry to a level last seen a decade ago. Tomlinson founded Financial Risk Management, a London-based fund of funds manager overseeing $10 billion, in 1991.
Hedge Week.com – For most of the past decade, the Cayman Islands have been the world’s dominant offshore alternative fund domicile. At the last count, the jurisdiction had around 10,000 funds, the vast majority of which are hedge funds of one stripe or another.
But with offshore financial services under hostile scrutiny as never before, Cayman finds itself on a ‘grey list’ of jurisdictions assessed by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development as having signed up to the principles of tax transparency and exchange of information but failed, so far at least, to have adequately implemented them by signing tax information exchange agreements with OECD members.
Times Online – The Financial Services Authority is facing a multimillion-pound compensation claim from a group of investors who say that the City watchdog failed to stop the activities of a suspected rogue trader.
Former clients of GFX Capital Markets, which has collapsed with estimated losses of £44 million, say that the FSA knew of serious concerns about its boss, Terry Freeman, but allowed him to continue trading.
The accusation comes as the regulator is struggling to cope with the most serious loss of public confidence in its decade-long history. It was accused of being negligent in its monitoring of Northern Rock, the mortgage lender that was nationalised last year, and the regulator’s chairman, Lord Turner of Ecchinswell, has been forced to draw up radical plans to improve its ability to police the City.
Houston Chronicle – Hedge funds, historically an investment reserved for big-ticket investors, are seemingly like mutual funds in that they typically invest in stocks and bonds. They have the added glamour and allure, however, of taking significant risks and gambles with their investments. Hedge funds may take risks by purchasing derivatives, or they may bet on the fall in price of particular securities by selling the securities short. (When you short sell, you borrow a security from a broker, sell it and then hope to buy it back later at a lower price.) Some hedge funds even invest in other hedge funds.
Earlier this decade, hedge funds got lots of attention, and plenty of wealthier investors were throwing big bucks into them. The allure was hedge funds claiming to have sidestepped the bear market in the early 2000s.
Bloomberg - Jean-Marie Eveillard, who beat 99 percent of rival equity fund managers last year by hoarding cash instead of borrowing it, is loading up on Japanese insurers and Hong Kong developers.
“Leverage eliminates your staying power,” said Eveillard, whose $16.8 billion First Eagle Global Fund beat the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index every year this decade. “If things go well, you look even better, but if things go badly, you end up doing worse,” he said in an interview from his office at Arnhold & S. Bleichroeder Advisers LLC overlooking Central Park in New York. “You could blow up if big leverage is being used.”
HedgeFund.Net – Swiss funds-of-funds firm Gottex Fund Management is launching a fund that will emulate the investment principles of U.S. “super endowments.”
The new fund will emulate the investment principles of successful U.S. university endowment funds, such as Harvard and Princeton. It will allocate about 65% to alternative investments. The alternative part of the portfolio will cut across all asset classes: hedge funds, private equity, commodities, long-only equity, fixed income, real estate and other real assets.
Harvard Management, long the model for university endowment funds currently with about $35 billion in assets, increased more than 20% year over year in 2007.
William Landes is helming the new fund. Landes joined Gottex from Boston-based 2100 Capital, his hedge fund specialty firm that Old Mutual Asset Management bought in 2005. Before that Landes was a money manager at Putnam Investments, which helped incubate 2100 Capital.
Financial Times – Shares in Barratt Developments led the housebuilding sector higher on Monday morning as it revealed a US fund manager had increased its stake in the heavily-indebted company to more than 6 per cent.
Polaris Capital Management, a Boston-based value fund manager, had previously bought a 5.73 per cent stake in Barratt, whose shares have tumbled as the housebuilding industry has suffered sharply lower sales volumes and weakening sales prices in the wake of the credit crunch.
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review- Activist shareholder Highfields Capital Management LP has alerted Alcoa Inc. it may increase its stake in the aluminum maker to as much as 8 percent, a move that would make the Boston-based hedge fund the company’s largest shareholder.
Highfields notified Alcoa last week that it intends to raise its stake, Alcoa said Monday in a statement. Highfields, which oversees $11 billion in investments, owned 1.9 percent of Alcoa, or 15.4 million shares, as of July 23, according to data compiled by CNBC.
Highfields already is familiar with Pittsburgh companies. In 2005, the company leaned heavily on Mellon Financial Corp. to take action to increase its stock price by buying an investment unit from Merrill Lynch and selling off Mellon’s processing businesses — even if it meant moving its headquarters from Pittsburgh. At the time, Highfields was one of Mellon’s largest institutional shareholders.
FINalternatives- Boston and San Francisco-based Bay Hill Capital Management this month launched its first hedge fund, a multi-strategy volatility offering with $25 million in initial assets.
According to Alec Petro, managing partner, the Bay Hill Fund has three sub-strategies: volatility arbitrage, which is a broad vega-neutral, high-frequency portfolio; dispersion, which trades different stock indices against the components that make up those indices; and relative value, which is more opportunistic and flow-driven.
“They’re not correlated so it produces a nice robust return stream, specifically in volatility,” said Petro. “It’s unique and I don’t know of any funds out there that think of volatility in different sub-strategies and combine them.”
Reuters- One year after Jeffrey Larson lost about $1.5 billion in one of the hedge fund industry’s most spectacular collapses, he is trying to raise fresh capital for a new fund, people familiar with his plans said.
"Larson is back and he has been calling virtually everyone in town, leaving no stone unturned," said a Boston-based investor who was contacted by Larson but declined to be identified so he could speak candidly about the new fund.
Larson’s $3 billion hedge fund firm, Sowood Capital Management, lost half of its capital a year ago following heavy losses on his bond market investments.
