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.
Bloomberg – An Indonesian beach isn’t the first place you’d look for clues about the trajectory of Asia’s economies. Here on the island of Bali, there are myriad ones. They are bankers, many of American and European origin.
The financiers are here for the Asian Development Bank’s annual meeting, and the fact they are here at all speaks volumes about Asia. Thailand last month had to cancel a meeting of regional leaders, also planned at a beach resort, amid political unrest. Indonesia’s confab is going off without a hitch.
It’s but the latest sign that Indonesia is among the most politically stable countries in Asia, and deserves more attention from global investors. The presidential election in July could be another plus for those betting on the world’s fourth most- populous nation.
Bloomberg – Bennelong Funds Management, an Australian fund manager with A$400 million ($271 million), will start a second hedge fund to ride through the financial crisis as it seeks to more than double funds under management.
Melbourne-based Bennelong wants to boost the assets it oversees to A$1 billion in the next three years, Jarrod Brown, chief executive officer, said yesterday in an interview in Sydney. Bennelong teamed up with Security Global Investors LLC to offer a long-short global equities fund in coming weeks to follow a long-only global fund the two began this month, he said.
SGI will manage the global funds under the Bennelong SGI name to gain access to Australia’s A$1.2 trillion dollar pool of managed funds after the $1.36 trillion hedge fund-industry shrank by more than 20 percent last year, and averaged losses of about 19 percent, the worst year on record.
Greenwich Time – The Greenwich-based Viking hedge fund group run by Andreas Halvorsen started a new fund to focus on buying stocks after selling them short became more risky.
Viking Long Fund LP began trading last month after initially raising about $80 million, the firm said in a Jan. 15 filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Halvorsen, a former protege of hedge-fund manager Julian Robertson at Tiger Management LLC — making him a so-called "Tiger cub" — oversees about $9.5 billion at Viking Global Investors LP in Greenwich.
The new fund avoids selling stocks short, which is a departure from Viking’s long-short strategy of trying to make money regardless of the market’s direction. In an October letter to investors, Halvorsen said the scope for expansion is much greater for buying stocks than for selling them with the expectation of further drops.
The Austin Chronicle – Oh, this is just dandy! Hedge-fund schemers and Wall Street manipulators – the very characters who brought us the Great American Housing Collapse – have a new target for their fast-buck profiteering: farming. E-I-E-I-O!
Speculators have long messed with farmers by artificially manipulating prices on everything from corn to soybeans. But now they’re pooling up billions of dollars from global investors to go after the farms themselves, as well as fertilizer plants, grain elevators, ships and barges, and other basic tools for producing, transporting, and storing our food supply. As one hedge-fund operator says: "It’s going on big time.
Wall Street & Technology – Global investors boosted their equity holdings for the second month running in December and cut bonds, thanks to signs of stabilising stock markets and tumbling government bond yields, Reuters polls showed on Monday.
Surveys of 44 leading investment houses in the United States, Japan, continental Europe and Britain showed an average mixed-asset portfolio holding 56.0 percent in stocks, up from 54.8 percent in November. However, it still remained below the long-term average holding of almost 60 percent.
Bond holdings fell to 33.0 percent in December from 34.3 percent the previous month, above the long-term average of around 32 percent.
Cash rose to 5.4 percent from 5.3 percent.
A rise in the respondents’ equity holdings comes as world stocks, measured by MSCI, rose nearly 20 percent after hitting a 5-1/2 year low on November 21.
A round of central bank interest rate cuts worldwide and the introduction of fiscal stimulus packages in major developed and emerging economies have helped convince many investors that stock markets might bottom before long.
Bloomberg – Lone Pine Capital LLC, run by Stephen Mandel, and Traxis Partners LLC are among 56 overseas funds that registered to buy shares in India in July, the most in six months, betting on a recovery in stocks.
Helios Capital Management Pte and Stonewater Capital LLC also won approval from the nation’s regulator, nine months after authorities forced hedge funds to register. The Securities & Exchange Board of India will review those rules in Mumbai today.
India’s stock market recovered its $1 trillion in market value last month, helped by the biggest drop in commodity prices in 28 years. The new funds may help reverse record sales of stocks by overseas investors that led to the biggest first-half slump in the Sensitive Index since its 1979 creation.
