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.
Forbes – The investment office of the Guinness family, which made its fortune in brewing, has taken a stake in 47 Degrees North and will back future fund launches, the fund of hedge funds firm said on Monday.
Under the deal, Iveagh will be a minority shareholder in 47 Degrees North and provide seed capital for new launches, which are set to include emerging managers and innovative hedge fund strategies, the hedge fund firm said in a statement. It did not give the size of the stake.
Bloomberg – DragonBack Capital Ltd., a Hong Kong-based manager co-founded by a former Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. executive, reopened its flagship hedge fund to investors after redemptions cut assets in the fund.
Assets in the Asia-Pacific Equity Multistrategy Fund fell 47 percent from the end of October peak, to $310 million, Chief Executive Officer Robert Lance said in an interview yesterday.
The fund’s 3.75 percent gain in 2008 put it among less than a third of hedge funds that made money in the worst year for the global industry. Investors have reduced holdings in some profitable funds after their weightings in portfolios exceeded limits set for specific hedge fund strategies.
Financial Standard – US investors can now access a liquid and transparent hedge fund replication strategy after IndexIQ launched the IQ Hedge Multi-Strategy Tracker ETF on the New York Stock Exchange.
The New York based firm’s exchange traded fund (ETF) seeks to replicate the returns of the IQ Hedge Multi-Strategy Index before fees and expenses.
The index holds a range of hedge fund strategies including equity long/short, global macro, market neutral, event driven and fixed income arbitrage.
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.
West Palm Beach (HedgeCo.net) – Morningstar reported a summary of hedge fund performance for January 2009 as well as asset flows for 2008. As stocks and government bonds got clobbered in January, hedge funds held up relatively well, the report said.
The Morningstar 1000 Hedge Fund Index declined only 1.2% and the currency-hedged Morningstar with MSCI Hedge Fund Composite Asset-Weighted Index rose 1.2%, against the MSCI World Index’s 8.9% drop and the BarCap Global Aggregate Index’s 3.3% decline.
"Some liquidity returned to the credit markets in January, helping certain hedge fund strategies, but even hedge funds trading equities persevered through January’s tough markets," said Morningstar Hedge Fund Analyst Nadia Papagiannis. "Overall, hedge funds held their own in January."
The rise in the U.S. dollar created profits for some price-trend-following and global-macro non-trend funds in January, but volatility across equity, government bond, and commodity markets throughout the month led to trading losses. The Morningstar Global Non-Trend Hedge Fund Index rose 0.1% while the Morningstar Global Trend Hedge Fund Index declined 1.6%.
Investors continued to pull out of hedge funds, withdrawing $26 billion in December and $70 billion for the year. Europe- and U.S.-equity hedge funds saw the largest redemptions, losing $14.8 and $18.3 billion respectively in 2008.
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Reuters – The Madoff scandal could be a boon for mutual funds as investors shift into regulated asset management vehicles in Luxembourg or Ireland away from hedge funds in the Caymans, a German mutual funds executive said.
"There’ll be a drive clearly toward more transparency and stricter supervision. That could be good for mutual funds," Stephan Kunze, head of Europe at Deutsche Bank’s mutual funds arm DWS, told Reuters in an interview.
"A lot of strategies that have been set up in the Caymans will migrate to Luxembourg or Ireland-domiciled replicas (with) hedge fund strategies migrating onto mutual fund platforms," he said, speaking on the sidelines of DWS’s annual news conference.
West Palm Beach (HedgeCo.net) – Hedge fund tech. provider Eze Castle Integration and Thomson Reuters are sponsoring a panel to discuss hedge fund strategies and regulatory considerations for the Obama administration, the ‘Obama Administration & Hedge Fund Strategies panel’.
Hedge funds and investment firms are discussing whether the Obama administration will have a positive or negative impact on existing hedge fund strategies.
Moderated by Daniel Burns, Reuters U.S. Financial Markets Editor, the panel also includes Reuters correspondents Jeff Mason and Jennifer Ablan and hedge fund managers Dan Castro, Chief Risk Officer of Huxley Capital and Theresa R. Patti, CFA, Managing Director of QFS Asset Management.
The Obama Administration & Hedge Fund Strategies panel will take place in New York City on Wednesday, January 28, from 5:30 – 7:30 p.m., at the Thomson Reuters office at 3 Times Square, New York.
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!
Markets Media News – The New Year is likely to see several important shifts in alternative investing, according to Don Steinbrugge, managing partner of Agecroft Partners, a global consulting and third-party marketing firm for hedge funds.
Steinbrugge said during the fourth quarter of 2008, investor demand started to shift toward market neutral strategies, as well as toward strategies that used little leverage and provided investors with transparency and liquidity. That shift will likely continue throughout 2009, he said.
Short-biased funds, which have always been a small percentage of the marketplace, surged ahead in 2008, delivering double-digit returns and capturing a larger market share of alternative investments. Steinbrugge said investors are likely to continue to invest in short-biased funds, but their growth will be at a slower pace than last year.
Commodity Trading Advisors (CTAs) are likely to see a lot of demand as well, as they also delivered double-digit returns last year and proved they are not correlated with other hedge fund strategies. Steinbrugge said, however, that does not mean traditional long-short equity funds are on their way out.
"Long-short equity funds have actually done pretty well in comparison to the S&P 500," Steinbrugge said. "I don’t think you’ll see a huge shift out of long-short equity."
AllAfrica.com – While the bank chiefs and the Central Bank of Nigeria have consistently advised Nigerians to keep faith with the ailing Nigerian Stock Exchange market, an investment adviser is suggesting that Nigerian investors should begin to seek alternative ways of investing their monies for better returns as the bearish trend in the market continues unabated.
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Mr. Olumide Oyetan, a director with the Stanbic IBTC Asset Management gave the suggestion when he delivered a paper titled: "Global financial crisis and its impact on the Nigerian financial market" at the Stanbic IBTC Asset Management limited end of year investors’ forum held in Lagos. According to him, "the benefit of alternative investments is to enhance total return and diversification of investments."
The alternative areas of investments he said are; Private Equity/Venture Capital, Credit/Structured Notes, Emotional Assets (Coins, Jewellery, Fine Art & Wine, etc) and Timber/Farmlands and Oil & Gas. Other options with high returns are "derivatives or physicals such as managed futures, commodities, currencies, hedge fund strategies, trading in volatility, carbon emissions, and weather derivatives among others."
