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.
CNBC – People who invested with Bernard Madoff were greedy and happy to accept high returns without probing too much in the way these were achieved, Hugh Hendry, chief investment officer at hedge fund Eclectica, told CNBC Tuesday.
"I’m sympathetic for people losing money but I think this pejorative term of being greedy still applies," Hendry told CNBC.com. "There was an implicit greed in not questioning and just accepting unnatural returns."
"They didn’t show the requisite amount of fear that would have generated the curiosity to investigate," he said, adding that for every one Madoff investor, there were ten who stayed on the sidelines.
Bloomberg – Fion Ye, who led the Pinpoint Rising China Fund to a 70.9 percent gain last year, has started a new asset management company aiming to profit from the country’s growing sway over global commodity markets.
Ye and former Pinpoint Investor Advisor Ltd. Chief Executive Officer Alex Li are setting up the Hong Kong head office for Everest Investment Advisors Ltd. Their first fund began investment on May 4 with initial capital of about $45 million, 60 percent of which came from outside investors, Li said in an interview yesterday.
Bloomberg – Hari Kumar, a founding partner of New York-based asset manager TPG-Axon Capital Management LP, is starting his own hedge fund with $75 million of initial capital from him and a partner, said two people familiar with the plan.
LionRock Capital Pte, based in Singapore, will begin investing June 1 with the money from Kumar and Julian Snaith, the people said. The multistrategy fund will focus on trading Asia-Pacific stocks, said the people, who declined to be identified because the information isn’t public.
LionRock may raise capital from external investors at a later date, though the timing and terms haven’t been decided, they added. Kumar and Snaith declined to comment when reached through e-mail.
New York (HedgeCo.Net) – Hedge fund manager Ray M. White and his company, CRW Management, LP, have been charged today by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission of swindling at least $10.9 million from over 250 investors through an alleged Ponzi scheme.
The complaint alleges that the Mansfield, Texas-based White, told investors their funds would be traded in the forex market and the strategy would reap returns of up to 416 percent annually.
Instead, White and CRW pocketed millions of dollars to fund a rampant spending spree which included homes, cars, Dallas Stars season tickets and the sponsorship of a drag racing team.
Out of the $10.9 million in initial capital they received, White and CRW used only $94,000 for forex trades. Ponzi schemes cease to work when new money coming in dries up; preventing the manager from paying back "returns" to anymore existing investors.
Christopher White and Hurricane Motorsports, LLC are also named by the CFTC as recipients of a portion of these funds in which they are not entitled to.
In the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, Judge Ed Kinkeade set the next hearing for March 11, while freezing assets and permitting the CFTC to seize records.
Julie Scuderi Senior Editor for HedgeCo.Net Email: julie@hedgeco.net
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! Be sure to check out our sister sites. www.hedgefundlounge.com, www.hedgefundtools.com, and www.hedgefundemployment.com
West Palm Beach (HedgeCo.Net)- Southridge LLC, a New York financial holding company, is launching a "not as you know" market neutral fund to add to their portfolio of funds.
The new fund, Southridge Market Neutral US LP has the capacity to grow to $1 billion, the fund will have a $500,000 investment minimum, 2/20 fees and monthly liquidity.
Ten years in the making, Southridge Market Neutral is designed and managed by Andrew G. White, CFA. "We’re quite encouraged that our new fund strongly outperformed during first half of 08, despite being a start-up in truly hostile markets. We’re even more optimistic for the future." White commented.
“We launched the fund as quantitative market neutral, but not as you know quant or market neutral," White said, "High return with low downside risk is possible if you first focus on return using objective trend-following in US large/mid cap stocks and then employ risk control including NO leverage.”
Focusing on what works and why, the strategy is objective trend-following instead of subjective mean reversion. Investing in US large/mid caps (100% long / 100% short), the fund strategy unusually uses no leverage or factor hedging. Nonetheless, risk/return profile is similar to 6:1 leveraged market neutral funds, but with a vastly smaller market footprint and black swan exposure.
Stephen Hicks, Southridge’s CEO, said, “As we leverage our twelve year track record at Southridge, we look forward to further broadening our product line for our investor base and view the Southridge Market Neutral US strategy as an integral part of that mosaic.”
Reuters- Singapore’s Wittenham Investment Management launched a fund of hedge funds to invest in frontier capital markets such as Africa, Middle East and countries in the former Soviet Union.
The MENA Plus fund would start with a minimum $7 million seed capital and has a capacity to take as much as $300 million of funds from investors, said Peter Douglas, an adviser to the fund and founder of hedge fund consultancy GFIA.
"In the emerging Europe, Middle East, and African time zone, we’ve found plenty of experienced managers creating very attractive risk-return profiles," he said in a statement.
West Palm Beach (HedgeCo.net)- New York based fund of hedge funds (FoHF) Ginepri Capital, and SAGA Capital, a New York alternative investments advisory firm, announced a newly formed venture, the SAGA/Ginepri Alpha Fund.
"Film investors will increasingly employ new techniques commonly used by investment banks, advisory firms and hedgers to analyze the risk/return profiles of potential securities investments." S.K. Dean, Managing Partner of Ginepri Capital said.
SG Alpha Fund will focus on the financing, analysis and securitization of mid to high budget independent films with committed distribution.
Both FoHF’s contributed significant proprietary risk capital to the new venture. SG Funds will be syndicating $400 million in debt, between a group of New York and European investment banks, to leverage the committed capital. The company will only green-light investments using the proprietary Movie Alpha Model.
"We are very enthusiastic about our association with Ginepri for the design, valuation, production and distribution of film portfolios and related acquisitions." Ralf Voellmer, SAGA President stated.
With a strong emphasis in analyzing the risk/returns in developed economies and emerging markets, the management team of SAGA has significant expertise in financial modeling, including analysis and securitization of deals with embedded credit risk, market risk, and operational risk.
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! Be sure to check out our sister sites. For more information, visit www.hedgeconetworks.com
