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.
Daily Mail – Women in the hedge fund industry have given strength to the theory that the world of finance would be more efficient if females were in control.
According to new figures from Hedge Fund Research, funds run by women have been doing much better than those managed by men during the past year of the financial crisis.
But they were still unable to work miracles – the figures showed female-run hedge funds were down 9.6 per cent over the 12 months, comparing with a fall of 19 per cent for the rest of the male-run industry.
Global Investor – Hedge funds are yet to make their presence felt in India, according to panelists at the Asia Securities Financing Master Class.
Hedge funds are yet to make their presence felt in India, according to panelists and participants at the Asia-Securities Financing Master Class, organised by International Securities Finance in Mumbai, India.
BBC News – The UK has “particular difficulties” regulating hedge funds “to put it politely”, Mr Steinbrueck told the weekly German news magazine.
“There clearly is a lobby in London that wants to defend its competitive advantage tooth and claw,” Mr Steinbrueck told Stern magazine. Germany and France have led calls for more restrictions on banks, which have been resisted by the US and UK.
Bloomberg – Ben Bernanke’s renomination as Federal Reserve chairman gives him a guaranteed job for four years, precisely the kind of long-term, risk-free tenure that regulators are trying to outlaw elsewhere in finance.
President Barack Obama was always going to leave Bernanke in the saddle, even if he does lack the all-important “Alumnus of Goldman Sachs Group Inc.” qualification that seems to be a prerequisite for anyone wanting to run anything in the United States of Keynesian Experimentation. Working out what bonus, if any, Bernanke might merit for his eight years steering the world’s biggest economy, though, is a tricky task.
Morningstar – A new breed of clone funds seeks to capture "alternative beta." It wasn’t long ago that hedge funds were on the very cutting edge of finance. Their pitch was simple: they could deliver pure alpha , rather than the heavy doses of beta being dished up by long-only mutual funds. The rub was that you’d have to pay dearly for that elusive component, and to get it, managers would often have to operate in inefficient markets where liquidity and capacity were scarce. Now that some of the mystique has left the asset class, a new concept has made its way to the investing frontier: hedge fund replication.
New York Times Blogs – E*Trade Financial is in talks with Citadel Investment Group, the hedge fund that is its largest shareholder, about a deal to shore up the struggling brokerage firm’s balance sheet, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter.
The two companies have been in negotiations for weeks to find a solution to E*Trade’s financial problems, The Journal said, adding that terms of the deal were unknown.
On Tuesday, E*Trade announced that Citadel Chief Executive Kenneth C. Griffin would be joining the firm’s finance and risk-oversight committee.
eFinancialCareers UK – Times are still not good for junior quants and mathematical PhDs who aspire to work in investment banks. With banks pulling back from complexity, there’s less need for their talents.
Mark Davis, a professor of maths at Imperial College, says lots of his students still want to work in finance, but they’re also being forced to contemplate defence, pharmaceutical work, and the consultancy branches of accountancy firms.
One recruiter says quants who can’t get into financial services are also to be found in “systematic gambling” at the likes of Betfair and Ladbrokes, where they analyze data in the same way hedge funds do.
Wealth Bulletin – AQR Capital Management intends to launch a line-up of mutual funds next month that will use a hedge-fund strategy developed in 1989 by founder Clifford Asness as a doctoral student in finance at the University of Chicago, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.
BNET – A hedge fund Ponzi scheme scandal is breaking in the blogosphere – and it goes right to the top of political power. A little while ago, blogger John Hempton, who writes Bronte Capital, a finance blog, started sniffing around Connecticut-based hedge fund Ponta Negra.
Hempton didn’t like what he found. After legal threats from the fund’s lawyers, Hempton retreated until a court ordered a freeze on the assets of Ponta Negra fund manager Francesco Rusciano amid allegations he lied to investors to raise more than $30 million. After that, the blogger published his findings.
The press has been agog recently about Paradigm Capital, a fund-of-hedge-funds run by members of Joe Biden’s family, and its apparent connection with a hedge fund shut by the SEC called Ponta Negra. CJR’s Audit column has the full details on this remarkable scoop by a finance blogger named John Hempton.
Among other things, Hempton was threatened by lawyers for Ponta Negra, forcing him to withdraw a post, as he detailed in a post yesterday.
AP – CNBC’s Jim Cramer has another feud on his hands.
Just weeks after "The Daily Show" host Jon Stewart took Cramer to task for trying to turn finance reporting into a "game," famous bear economist Nouriel Roubini criticized Cramer on Tuesday for predicting bull markets.
"Cramer is a buffoon," said Roubini, a New York University economics professor often called Dr. Doom. "He was one of those who called six times in a row for this bear market rally to be a bull market rally and he got it wrong. And after all this mess and Jon Stewart he should just shut up because he has no shame."
Forbes – John Rutledge is the chairman of Rutledge Capital, a private equity investment firm that has invested more than $150 million in middle-market manufacturing, distribution and service companies. He is also member of the Advisory Boards of B.V. Group, a venture capital, hedge fund and real estate investment firm, and First Q Capital, a hedge fund.
Rutledge is a visiting professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and chief adviser for finance and investment to the governor of the Haidian District in Beijing. He is a board member of the Progress and Freedom Foundation, the Heartland Institute and a senior fellow at the Pacific Research Institute.
