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HedgeCo.net (West Palm Beach) – Man Investments’ seeding fund, RMF Global Emerging Managers, has completed its second incubation deal of the last two months, providing a cornerstone investment of $50 million for Hong Kong’s Minerva Macro Fund.
In July RMF GEM invested $50 million in the flagship product of 5:15 Capital Management, an unrelated fixed income arbitrage manager based in Connecticut.
Minerva is managed by Stanley Ku, who founded the Hong Kong office of hedge fund Fortress Investment Group and most recently managed $750 million for Fortress’ Drawbridge Global Macro Fund. Dorothy Lau, Minerva’s risk and business manager, formerly worked for JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs.
“Stanley Ku’s work at Fortress and Goldman Sachs has made him a very well respected money manager in Asia,” said Hans Hurschler, head of Man Investments’ hedge fund Ventures. “We believe that Minerva has the potential to generate solid, stable returns and that it may attract substantial assets.”
Minerva is a discretionary global macro fund, focused on Asia. It trades only highly liquid instruments such as interest rate or bond futures, foreign exchange forwards and equity index futures or sector ETFs. The entire portfolio is designed to be liquidated in 48 hours.
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Reuters – Harvard Management Co, which invests the Ivy League school’s multibillion dollar endowment, hired two investment managers away from two prominent hedge funds, the university said on Wednesday.
Emil Dabora, a senior managing director at Caxton Associates, will join as an equity portfolio manager while Michele Toscani, now at Fortress Investment Group, will join the international fixed income portfolio management team.
Reuters – Fortress Investment Group LLC, one of the few publicly traded U.S. hedge fund groups, reported a narrower quarterly loss on surprisingly strong revenue Wednesday, and forecast improved demand for its portfolios in coming quarters.
Fortress executives said several funds delivered respectable returns in the first half the year, and they expect demand to pick up as financial markets recover.
Reuters – The following corporate finance-related stories were reported by media on Friday:
* Fortress Investment Group, among the largest private equity and hedge fund firms, is looking to go on an acquisition drive, the Financial Times said, citing a memo passed to Fortress staff. [ID:nBNG147186]
* Spain’s Cosmen family and private equity group CVC have made a joint takeover approach for British bus and rail group National Express Group Plc, the Financial Times reported on Friday, citing people close to the situation. [ID:nLN409582]
CNBC – Fortress Investment Group LLC has named former Fannie Mae CEO Daniel H. Mudd as its new CEO, effective Aug. 11.
Mudd, a Fortress board member, takes over for co-founder and majority shareholder Wesley Edens. Edens will remain with the alternative asset manager as co-chairman, a title he will share with Peter L. Briger.
Fortress said late Sunday that the personnel change will allow Edens, along with Briger, Michael Novogratz, Robert Kauffman and Randal Nardone, to concentrate on managing existing investments and finding new investment opportunities. The four executives will continue to own about 70 percent of the company.
Bloomberg – Stanley Ku, former head of Fortress Investment Group LLC’s Hong Kong office, plans to start an Asia- focused hedge fund to profit from macroeconomic developments, according to a marketing document given to potential investors.
Minerva Macro Fund, to be managed by Hong Kong-based Ku, will start investing in early August, two people with knowledge of the plan said. It seeks to generate annual returns of 12 percent to 22 percent trading stocks, interest rate, currency and commodity instruments in large and liquid markets, according to the document, obtained by Bloomberg.
Bloomberg – Blackstone Group LP and Fortress Investment Group LLC are seeking to take over credit funds from managers unable to support their businesses after the value of investments fell.
There are “a lot of companies that are on the block,” Tony James, Blackstone’s president, said on a conference call yesterday with investors. New York-based Blackstone, the world’s biggest private-equity company, is “looking hard at consolidating acquisitions,” he said.
Reuters – Fortress Investment Group LLC , one of the few publicly traded U.S. alternative asset managers, said on Monday its quarterly loss more than quadrupled, hurt by writedowns in some private equity funds.
The net loss was $140 million, or $1.50 per share, compared with a reported net loss of about $29 million, or 43 cents, a year earlier, New York-based Fortress said.
Results reflected a $265 million loss in principal investments. This included a $228 million for investments in private equity firms, a $27 million loss on investments in hedge funds, and $10 million of interest expenses.
Blueridgenow.com – Hedge funds have been in the news recently, usually with a watered down description of the characteristics of these investment vehicles. Most folks know that Chelsea Clinton works for a hedge fund (Avenue Capitol), and that John Edwards pulled down a hefty $500,000 consulting fee from another hedge fund, Fortress Investment Group. The odious George Soros, a contributor to hard left political groups, manages a hedge fund called Quantum Fund.
Edwards said he wanted to learn more about poverty. And where better to learn about poverty than working for an investment company that requires its clients to have at least a million dollars net worth (Since then, Fortress has navigated enough legal hurdles to offer its services to the general public through a listing on the New York Exchange, but that’s unusual.)
Reuters - Two years ago, investors scrambled to snap up shares in elite hedge fund firms, eager for a piece of the lucrative action. What they got instead were big losses.
Starting in early 2007, when hedge fund and private equity firms were minting cash, four private investment firms cracked open the door to let in small investors. Fortress Investment Group LLC, Och-Ziff Capital Management Group, Blackstone Group LP and GLG Partners Inc led a new class of firms that let ordinary investors ride the wave of hedge fund riches.
guardian.co.uk – Hedge fund investors may face an expensive tug-of-war with managers, according to a new research paper that suggests they could lose as much as 15 percent of their initial investments should they be unable to exit when they want.
Hedge fund investors have rarely been allowed to pull their cash out immediately, but now they are sometimes being told that they may not be able to pull it out at all as the industry faces its worst-ever returns.
Dozens of prominent hedge funds, including Fortress Investment Group LLC and Tudor Investment Corp, have recently restricted redemptions in some of their portfolios.
This trend is not only aggravating but also extremely pricey, Nicolas Bollen, a professor at Vanderbilt University’s Owen Graduate School of Management, said in an interview.
Bloomberg – D.E. Shaw & Co. LP, the investment firm run by David Shaw, and Farallon Capital Management LLC limited withdrawals by clients, joining more than 80 hedge-fund managers to impose restrictions in the past two months.
D.E. Shaw, which oversees $36 billion, capped redemptions from its Composite and Oculus funds, said two people familiar with the New York-based company. Farallon, a $30 billion firm based in San Francisco, did the same with its biggest fund after investors asked to get back more than 25 percent of their money.
The firms are two of the biggest to block withdrawals, known as putting up gates, so they aren’t forced to liquidate investments at distressed prices to raise cash. New York-based Fortress Investment Group LLC said yesterday it froze an $8 billion fund after getting redemption requests for 40 percent of its assets. Tudor Investment Corp., the Greenwich, Connecticut, firm run by Paul Tudor Jones, locked the $10 billion BVI Global fund last week ahead of plans to split the fund into two.
