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 – Australian investment bank Macquarie Group Ltd has managed to quell concerns on its capital position but is now bracing for its next big challenge of the global credit crisis: how to prevent its world-renowned specialist listed-funds model from crumbling.
Macquarie pioneered the specialist listed funds model in the early 1990s, encouraging even some Wall Street investment banks to follow suit. Fees from managing specialist funds made up 13.3 percent of Macquarie’s total income in the year to March 31, 2009.
Bloomberg – Brazil’s main airports are filled with the country’s fastest-growing import: Brazilians returning home after losing their jobs in the U.S., Japan and Europe.
They left their homeland for jobs in more developed countries years ago, and sent some of their wages to the struggling families they left behind. Now they are out of work, evicted from employer-supplied housing and arriving back home to an economy ill-equipped to absorb or help them.
Most of them are called dekasseguis, a Japanese word meaning “to leave work.” Brazil has the largest Japanese population outside Japan and during Latin America’s economic crises in the 1980s and early 1990s many Brazilians with Japanese ancestry moved to the island nation in search of better jobs. About 322,000 Brazilians work in Japan, making them the third-largest community of foreign workers there, according to Japan’s Ministry of Justice.
New York Post – Fed up with misbehavior in the hedge-fund industry, respected hedge-fund investor Sandra Manzke is fighting back.
A pioneer in hedge-fund investing and best known for founding Tremont Capital Management, Manzke sent an angry missive to hundreds of her peers earlier this week, calling on them to join together to push for reform in the $1.5 trillion industry.
"I am appalled and disgusted by the activities of a number of hedge-fund managers," said the letter, which raises a fist against what Manzke sees as a general degradation of ethics in the industry.
AlterNet – Jack Nash, a key pioneer of the global hedge fund industry, passed away this past summer. Much of the rest of the industry may soon join him six feet under. The industry, one insider told the Financial Times last week, has embarked on "a sort of death march."
Hedge funds now appear to be the next chunk of high finance headed for meltdown. They may actually do their melting before most Americans even know what they are.
A quick primer: Hedge funds have been operating in the financial world’s immensely lucrative shadows ever since Jack Nash co-founded Odyssey Partners, the granddaddy of the modern hedge fund, in 1982, just one year after Ronald Reagan slashed tax rates on America’s highest incomes.
The new tax rates — the lowest the rich had seen since the early 1930s — meant that wealthy Americans suddenly had plenty of new cash sloshing in their pockets. Nash promised these affluents high annual returns if they gave him their money to invest — and then delivered. Over the next 14 years, Odyssey delighted investors with a 24 percent average annual return.
Reuters – Hedge-fund pioneer Paul Tudor Jones and veteran stock picker James Pallotta are mulling changes to their 15-year partnership, including a possible parting of ways that could affect their $18 billion fund empire, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.
A split between Pallotta and Jones, the veteran trader who started Tudor Investment Corp, would mark the end of one of the most successful and well-known hedge-fund duos in history, the paper said.
Jones has talked privately in recent weeks about the possibility of restructuring his firm in a way that could result in a separation with Pallotta, the Journal said, citing people familiar with the discussions.
New York Times Blogs – Jack Nash, a former chairman of Oppenheimer & Company who helped pioneer the modern hedge fund business, died July 30 in Manhattan. He was 79.
He died at Mount Sinai Medical Center after a long illness, according to his family.
Mr. Nash, who fled Nazi Germany with his family at the age of 12, joined Oppenheimer as a trainee in 1951 when it was still a small Wall Street investment firm. He left briefly to work for his father’s textile business, but returned to the firm in 1954.
Mr. Nash became the company’s president in 1974, and its chairman in 1979.
At Oppenheimer Mr. Nash met Leon Levy, his longtime business partner. They specialized in leveraged buyouts and transformed the company into one of the world’s largest mutual fund businesses.
