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.
Globe and Mail – Harry Dent, a U.S. economist and author known in some circles as the “sage of doom and gloom,” is backing this week’s launch of Dent Tactical ETF – a rare breed among exchange-traded funds.
Dent Tactical is an actively managed ETF in that it doesn’t track an index. It invests in sector, industry or country ETFs where Mr. Dent sees opportunities based on demographic and other trends.
While this fund is among a handful of non-index ETFs in North America, it’s part of a growing niche that is expected to rival traditional mutual funds, observers say.
Reuters – HSBC Holdings Plc, Europe’s biggest bank, is to unveil plans to enter into the European exchange traded fund (ETF) market with its first launch, the Financial Times said on Monday.
”We believe our future is linked to indexation and ETFs and not just active management,” Farley Thomas, global head of wholesale distribution at HSBC Global Asset Management, told the newspaper.
Reuters – Nick Bullman, who told Reuters he has this week placed bets on falling share prices, is concerned that government stimulus packages have not revived bank lending as much as hoped and that conditions remain as tough for companies as they did last year.
"The rally has been a ‘dash for trash’ based on speculation … On Wednesday (I) went short on the Standard and Poor (500) and financials via ETFs (exchange-traded funds)," he said in an interview on Friday.
HedgeCo.net (West Palm Beach) – One of the first no-load, open-end mutual funds designed to replicate broad-based hedge fund performance characteristics, the ‘IQ ALPHA Hedge Strategy Fund’ (IQHIX) has marked its one-year anniversary on June 30th, 2009.
For the trailing 12-month period, the fund was down -2.58 percent, compared to a loss of -26.21 percent for the S&P 500.
“The performance over the past year can be attributed to a number of factors, including the ability of the fund to hold both long and short positions, and the liquidity of the ETFs used to represent asset class exposures,” said Adam Patti, IndexIQ’s Chief Executive Officer. “As a result, we were able to continuously execute our strategy during the period, something not all hedge funds could do.”
The fund works by optimizing the relative index weights among six hedge fund strategies, Equity Long/Short; Global Macro; Emerging Markets; Fixed Income Arbitrage; Equity Market Neutral; and Event Driven.
The funds do not invest in hedge funds, but use ETFs and a variety of other highly liquid financial instruments to provide exposure to the components of the index in approximately the same weighting. It employs leverage totaling 25 percent of the portfolio to magnify returns.
HedgeCo.Net is a premier hedge fund database and community for qualified and accredited investors only. Membership on www.hedgeco.net is FREE and EASY. We also offer FREE LISTINGS for Hedge Funds!
New York Daily News – The hedge fund industry has a public relations problem these days and you have to be a millionaire to invest in one anyway, but there’s a new fund for more modest investors that can offer similar benefits.
The IQ Hedge Multi-Strategy Tracker Exchange-Traded Fund doesn’t actually invest in hedge funds, but attempts to replicate their performance.
The fund does this by holding other ETFs that own various asset classes, including stocks, bonds, currencies and commodities.
Adam Patti, CEO of IndexIQ, the company behind the new fund, said it even enjoys some advantages over hedge funds, including the ability to sell on a moment’s notice. Hedge funds typically offer limited times to sell.
IndexUniverse.com – Two new db x-trackers ETFs were admitted to trading on the Deutsche Boerse Xetra platform on Wednesday, one tracking a Deutsche Bank hedge fund index, and the other tracking the Russell 2000 Index.
The db x-trackers db Hedge Fund Index ETF (ISIN: LU0328476337) tracks the performance of the db Hedge Fund Index. The index captures five different core hedge fund strategies, as represented by the dbX-Tactical Hedge Fund ("THF") Index family, all proprietary Deutsche Bank indices. The five core hedge fund strategies are equity hedge, market-neutral, systematic macro, event-driven, and credit and convertible. The Index is systematically rebalanced quarterly. Allocations to each of the underlying THF Indices will be made on a non-discretionary basis, to reflect distributions of assets by strategy across the hedge fund industry, and mapped to a well recognised third party industry benchmark index.
