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Bloomberg - Hedge funds run by Jeffrey Gendell and John Burbank III posted their worst monthly losses in October. Peter Thiel gave back gains made earlier in the year. Nobel-prize winner Myron Scholes froze his biggest fund.

The managers, like many in the $1.7 trillion hedge-fund industry, were caught in a downdraft of market declines, client redemptions, demands from lenders for more collateral and forced asset sales that accelerated after Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. collapsed in mid-September.

Funds fell by an average 5.4 percent last month, pushing the year-to-date drop to 15.5 percent, according to the HFRI Fund Weighted Composite Index compiled by Chicago-based Hedge Fund Research Inc. Investors have been handed losses for five straight months, the longest streak since HFRI started the index in 1990.

“October was the perfect storm for liquidity drying up, especially in the credit markets,” said Gary Vaughan-Smith, co- founder of London-based SilverStreet Capital LLP, which has $600 million invested in hedge funds for its clients. “We are through the worst and the turmoil should be gone by the end of November.”

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Bloomberg - Nicola Horlick’s money-management firm, Bramdean Alternatives Ltd., pulled money out of hedge funds run by Nobel prize-winner Myron Scholes and James Dinan to focus on more defensive funds as volatility increases.

“In response to the continuing market turbulence,” Bramdean “is increasing the focus on capital preservation,” the London-based company said in a statement today.

Horlick’s firm pulled money from five of the eight money managers who oversee its so-called transitional portfolio. Bramdean redeemed investments in Dinan’s York Capital Management LLC’s Asian and European funds, and Scholes’s Platinum Grove Contingent Capital Offshore Fund.

The monthly reshuffle is Bramdean’s biggest since the firm raised 131 million pounds ($243 million) in a share sale a year ago. The transitional pool, Bramdean’s largest, fell 1.4 percent in July as hedge funds struggle through their worst patch in almost 20 years, according to Chicago-based Hedge Fund Research Inc. HFR’s Global Hedge Fund Index fell 2.8 percent in July, its biggest monthly drop in five years.

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