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.
International Herald Tribune – A Silicon Valley hedge fund manager has been arrested in Hong Kong on charges that he bilked investors out of at least $5 million.
According to a criminal complaint unsealed Wednesday in San Jose federal court, Albert Hu faces six counts of wire fraud charges for an investment fraud scheme involving hedge funds he administered from 2002 to 2008, the San Jose Mercury News reported.
International Herald Tribune – U.S. hedge fund Harbinger Capital is the first company to declare a short position in HSBC following the bank’s record rights issue, after making millions from a similar tactic with UK bank HBOS last year.
Harbinger said in a regulatory filing it has taken a 0.26 percent short position in HSBC’s London shares, worth about 110 million pounds. By 9:10 a.m. the shares were up 2.5 percent at 356 pence.
Harbinger has also unveiled a series of short positions in Spanish banks in recent weeks, including a short position of 1 percent in BBVA and 0.4 percent in Santander.
International Herald Tribune – Two senior senators have introduced legislation to impose U.S. government oversight on hedge funds.
The legislation by Senator Carl Levin, a Democrat of Michigan, and Senator Charles Grassley, a Republican of Iowa, was filed Thursday while the administration of President Barack Obama prepared a broader legislative overhaul of the regulatory system, including an effort to regulate hedge funds more tightly.
State regulators and a panel created by Congress to oversee the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program issued separate but similar regulatory proposals Thursday. The proposals also seemed to mirror closely many of the provisions that administration officials say will be part of their plan.
International Herald Tribune – Fund manager Polar Capital Holdings said on Friday that assets under management in the nine months to December fell by 22 percent to $2.45 billion (1.65 billion pounds), due to market deterioration.
The fund manager, which runs hedge funds and long-only funds, said it expects $500 million of redemptions in the three months to March.
The resignation of Julian Barnett, manager of its Paragon hedge fund, is expected to bring about a further $400 million outflows when the fund is wound up.
International Herald Tribune – J. Ezra Merkin, a New York financier, wrote his investors last month that he too was shocked by the news that Bernard Madoff’s hedge fund was an elaborate Ponzi scheme.
But not everyone sees him as a victim. The New York attorney general, Andrew Cuomo, has issued subpoenas in an effort to determine whether Merkin had defrauded universities and charities when he invested their money with Madoff, a person with knowledge of the case said Thursday.
Cuomo’s office is seeking information from Merkin, the three investment funds that he operated and 15 nonprofit institutions that gave him money to manage. Many of the institutions are now suing Merkin, claiming that they lost millions of dollars when he had invested money with Madoff without telling them.
West Palm Beach (HedgeCo.net) – Some analysts are saying that the mighty New York Times might be headed down the same path as the bankrupt Tribune Company, owner of the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times.
Hedge fund shareholders, Harbinger Capital Partners Funds and Firebrand Partners own 19% of the NYT Company, and the outlook does not look good. NYT is approximately $1 billion in debt, the result of its move to a new building on Eighth Avenue a couple of years ago.
Harbinger Capital Partners has grown to one of the 15 largest hedge funds, by assets, in America. Firebrand Partners is an operational activist firm that invests in publicly-traded companies whose brand equity represents significant upside relative to their market capitalization.
The NYT Company includes The New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, The Boston Globe and 15 other daily newspapers.
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!
International Herald Tribune – It used to be that if you wanted a job done properly, you did it yourself. That no longer holds for the administration of hedge funds.
The practice of doing middle- and back-office administrative work in-house, especially prevalent in long-established U.S. funds, was already on the wane.
But Bernard Madoff’s alleged fraud, abetted by his self-contained operation, has accelerated the march toward outsourcing.
Exhibit A this week is Millennium Management, the old-school hedge fund firm run by Izzy Englander. All its funds are now going to be administered by GlobeOp Financial Services. That means that tasks like reconciling cash positions and trades, some pricing and asset value calculations, sending clients statements and so on will now be handled outside the firm.
International Herald Tribune – Hedge funds have suffered a shakeout in 2008. The average hedge fund fell almost 20 percent, according to Hedge Fund Research. No fund has yet required a bailout. But many won’t be around in the new year, and those that have survived are battered and bruised. Hedge fund managers must accept that the industry won’t be quite the same again.
Here are six changes they need to prepare for:
Liquidity is the new watchword. Like investment banks, hedge funds didn’t think much about the structure of their financing during the boom times. But a flood of redemption requests in late 2008, just as they were struggling with illiquid markets and scarce credit, caught them out. Many hedge funds annoyed their investors by blocking withdrawals. In the future, funds that invest in illiquid assets will need to lock in their investors longer. And those wishing to give investors regular access to their money will have to focus on liquid markets.
Forbes – German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Thursday called on the European Commission to quickly approve Germany’s planned aid for lender Commerzbank as part of its bank rescue package.
Germany is in a dispute with the Commission over whether the aid for Commerzbank complies with the terms of the 500 billion euro ($633.4 billion) rescue fund that the EU has approved.
