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Bloomberg – Geneva’s funds of hedge funds saw client inflows for the first time in 11 months in August, halting a slump that accelerated after losses related to Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme.
Net inflows were $30 million, after withdrawals of $2 billion in July, according to data compiled for Bloomberg News by Singapore-based Eurekahedge Pte. Total assets in Geneva-based funds of hedge funds climbed almost 1 percent to $14.3 billion, after slumping 74 percent during the previous 19 months.
Bloomberg – Geneva banks, which began investing client money in funds of hedge funds during the 1960s, are struggling to rebuild the business after market losses and Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme cut assets by 72 percent.
The assets of funds of funds managed from Geneva slumped to $15 billion in May from $54.2 billion at the end of 2007, according to data compiled by Singapore-based Eurekahedge Pte. Almost 25 percent of the 227 funds operating in the city at the end of last year shut in the first five months of 2009 and only six opened, less than a fifth of the 2008 number.
Bloomberg – Geneva banks, which began investing client money in funds of hedge funds during the 1960s, are struggling to rebuild the business after market losses and Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme cut assets by 72 percent.
The assets of funds of funds managed from Geneva slumped to $15 billion in May from $54.2 billion at the end of 2007, according to data compiled by Singapore-based Eurekahedge Pte. Almost 25 percent of the 227 funds operating in the city at the end of last year shut in the first five months of 2009 and only six opened, less than a fifth of the 2008 number.
Reuters India – Asian hedge funds were up a fourth straight month in June, rising an estimated 1.79 percent, on the strength of gains in Chinese and Japanese stocks, hedge-fund tracker Eurekahedge said.
The positive returns in June, which is based on preliminary data, brought gains since the start of 2009 to 13.96 percent.
Japan hedge funds gained 2.14 percent, North American funds edged up 0.60 percent, European funds lost 0.15 percent and Latin American funds returned 1.19 percent, the Singapore-based firm said in a statement on Wednesday.
West Palm Beach (HedgeCo.net) – AlternativeSoft has forged agreements with Crédit Agricole Structured Asset Management (CASAM) and Eurekahedge to provide all trial users of AlternativeSoft with free trials of the CASAM CISDM and the Eurekahedge Global Hedge Funds databases.
“We’re very pleased to build our relationship with AlternativeSoft in a way that will meaningfully strengthen Crédit Agricole Structured Asset Management’s presence in the alternative investment software sector. We are happy to offer AlternativeSoft and their potential clients the CASAM Hedge database for their 15 day software trial" said Jeff Lopez, Deputy CEO of Credit Agricole Structured Asset Management Advisers LLC.
"AlternativeSoft offers hedge fund investors the ability to perform complex portfolio optimisations in an efficient manner. We are delighted to be able to offer to these investors our multiple Eurekahedge databases during their 15 days free software trial. Doing so will give the opportunity to experience the software and the breadth of our database at the same time." said Eurekahedge CEO Alexander Mearns.
“AlternativeSoft is a user friendly quantitative portfolio construction software which focuses on extreme negative events. Our potential clients will have access to 13’000 hedge funds and this for free during the 15 days software trial. The trial of our software becomes effortless. The user can essentially construct and optimise their portfolios within minutes of opening the software, even in the 15 days free software trial.” said Laurent Favre, CEO of AlternativeSoft.
AlternativeSoft offers analytical software solutions and is a Swiss registered company with offices in Zurich and London. It is a global company providing a platform for portfolio construction, hedge fund selection, tactical asset allocation and hedge fund replication dedicated to fund of funds, banks and institutional investors. Their software enables investors to analyse numerous hedge funds, funds of funds to help construct portfolios which minimise extreme negative returns.
Opalesque – Last week, we heard of fund launches from Galena (energy); Verulam (commodity); Twin Tree; Paulson & Co (distressed property); Abax (Asia macro); Odey (Ucits III); Pictet (agriculture); and Liontrust (European).
The Canadian Hedge Watch Hedge Fund Composite Index was up 2.26% in April (+4.66% YTD); RBC Hedge 250 Index 2.37%, 2.6% YTD; Morningstar 1000 Hedge Fund Index 3.4% (est.), 3.11% YTD; Lyxor’s investable Global Hedge Fund index -0.45%, 0.93% YTD; Greenwich Global Hedge Fund Index 3.49%, 3.91% YTD; Scotia Capital Canadian Hedge Fund Index -0.61%, 4.98% YTD; And the Eurekahedge April report showed hedge funds were up 3.9% YTD, and that the industry assets were now at $1.30tn.
West Palm Beach (HedgeCo.net) – There were fewer redemptions in February 2009,($11 billion) compared to January,($30 billion), according to preliminary reports from Eurekahedge, pointing towards the easing of redemption pressures for hedge funds in the future.
The Hedge Fund Index was down 0.5% in February suggesting another month of loss mitigation and strong relative outperformance – The S&P500 was down 11%.
Interestingly, Eurekahedge says, fund of funds managers (-0.2%), on average, have now outperformed hedge fund managers for the first two months of 2009 after 12 months of consecutive underperformance for 2008.
Latin American funds were the only ones to finish the month with decent gains (0.7%), as managers in the region were afforded opportunities with the weakening of most regional currencies against the US dollar, among other things during the month.
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Bloomberg – Kanetsu Asset Management Co. will liquidate hedge funds, including Japan’s best performer last year, as commodities trading shrinks, a company executive said.
The Tokyo-based firm will shut DragonHorse, which according to data provider Eurekahedge Pte returned 27 percent in 2008, the highest among Japan-based hedge funds. Kanetsu Asset will also close two other hedge funds before the firm shuts at the end of March, because computer-driven trading of commodities has become less viable as volumes have declined, President Takashi Ogura said in a telephone interview today.
As many as 920 funds globally may have closed last year, eclipsing the previous record of 848, according to Chicago-based Hedge Fund Research Inc. Japan’s dwindling commodities market and regulatory hurdles to combining commodities trading with financial securities hindered Kanetsu Asset, which had 800 million yen ($8.9 million) in assets.
West Palm Beach (HedgeCo.net) – Hedge funds returned a healthy 1% in January, wrapping up a tumultuous 2008 at -12.3%, according to Eurekahedge. Hedge fund assets fell $380 billion or 20% in 2008, from just under $1.9 trillion to just over $1.5 trillion.
Eurekahedge’s forecast expects to see more hedge fund start-ups in the near future, given the increasing number of people moving out of investment banks (whether voluntarily or otherwise) to venture into the hedge fund space.
In terms of returns, hedge funds are in a better position to generate superior returns than most other conventional managers and market players, owing to the flexibility that hedge fund managers enjoy, the Eurekahedge report says, their ability to identify new trends and investment ideas and act on them promptly.
"We anticipate trend-following strategies to continue benefiting from market movements across the currency and commodity markets, as they had through most of 2008. We expect the equity markets to remain volatile and range-bound over the next few months, but long/short managers could potentially benefit from pockets of opportunities (even if short-term ones) on both the long and the short side, given the uncertainty around the 4Q08 earnings reports and deeply discounted valuations across most sectors."
Business Times Malaysia – Hedge funds posted their biggest decline on record last year, losing US$350 billion globally, as the credit crisis crippled returns and forced investors to pull money out, an industry report showed.
About 90 per cent of the money was lost in the three months to the end of November, according to a preliminary report published on Monday by Singapore-based data provider Eurekahedge.
Funds that invested in North America declined the most, posting a drop of US$183 billion for the year, the report said.
The hedge-fund industry shrank by about a fifth to US$1.5 trillion at the end of the year from a peak of US$1.9 trillion, Eurekahedge said.
Bloomberg – Wolver Hill Japan Multi-Strategy Fund, run by Deutsche Bank AG’s former prime brokerage sales chief in Tokyo, resisted the worst month for the nation’s stocks in almost 15 years to be little changed in September.
The $11 million fund of hedge funds, which invests in 14 hedge funds with a combined $5.8 billion of assets, slipped 1.4 percent in September based on preliminary figures, said Ed Rogers, chief executive officer of Wolver Hill’s local advisory firm, Rogers Investment Advisors Y.K. The Topix index of 1,714 companies tumbled 13 percent.
Foreseeing a decline in equity prices, Wolver Hill made a shift during the past year into hedge funds that use trading- focused strategies, and away from so-called long-short funds that depend on rising and falling stock prices, Rogers said. Trading- focused funds, including so-called event-driven strategies, trade securities of companies going through events such as mergers, acquisitions and management changes.
Bloomberg – Rogers Investment Advisors Y.K., a Tokyo-based hedge fund adviser, has hired Yoshiaki Iizuka and Eric Chong as it expects to more than double assets by the year-end.
Iizuka, 52, joined Rogers Investment on Aug. 1 as a managing director and head of Japanese research in Tokyo, after his most recent stint as chief investment officer of Tokyo-based Traders Investment Management Co., now JPS Asset Management Co., Ed Rogers, chief executive officer of Rogers Investment, said in an interview in Tokyo. Iizuka was chief executive officer of American Express Financial Advisors Japan Inc., Rogers said.
Chong, 36, joined Wolver Hill Advisors in New York, the U.S. counterpart of Rogers Investment, in mid-July, as a risk manager, Rogers said. He was most recently a risk manager at Societe Generale Asset Management Inc. in New York, where he was responsible for risk evaluation and analysis for a $5 billion fund of hedge funds, according to Rogers. Prior to that, Chong was a vice president at Stamford, Connecticut-based K2 Advisors LLC, a $6 billion multi-strategy fund of hedge funds.
