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 – Some of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s closest aides, none of whom faced Senate confirmation, earned millions of dollars a year working for Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Citigroup Inc. and other Wall Street firms, according to financial disclosure forms.
The advisers include Gene Sperling, who last year took in $887,727 from Goldman Sachs and $158,000 for speeches mostly to financial companies, including the firm run by accused Ponzi scheme mastermind R. Allen Stanford. Another top aide, Lee Sachs, reported more than $3 million in salary and partnership income from Mariner Investment Group, a New York hedge fund.
Reuters – Massachusetts will remove $1.6 billion from hedge fund managers Blackstone, Crestline, EIM Management, and Strategic Investment Group as it shifts its investment strategy after suffering recent heavy losses.
Trustees for the roughly $40 billion fund voted on Tuesday to pull out of four firms that used portable alpha, a once popular technique employed by pension funds to beat markets that underperformed during the financial crisis.
“This is a strategic shift and not a dissatisfaction with the individual managers,” said the pension fund’s chief investment officer, Stanley Mavromates.
Citywire.co.uk – Fund selector Christian Lundström, from Independent Investment Group in Sweden, is welcoming the evolution of the Ucits III space which is seeing more and more hedge fund groups entering the area.
Last week, HSBC Asset Management’s Farley Thomas warned on the trend of hedge fund groups launching Ucits-compliant funds, saying ‘Ucits is about trust, so retail fund firms in Europe should be protective of Ucits. Will the hedge fund firms be there to hold retail investors’ hands when things go wrong?’
While there may be fears for retail investors accessing such funds, many selectors are greeting the changes with open arms. Lundström is excited by the opportunity to access strategies which can ‘generate portfolio returns with low or even negative correlation to equities and commodities.’
Bloomberg – Tokio Marine Holdings Inc., Japan’s biggest casualty insurer, plans to trim hedge-fund investments and shift more of its portfolio in the industry to strategies such as macro and long-short equity funds.
Tokio Marine & Nichido Fire Insurance Co., a unit of Tokio Marine Holdings with 8.4 trillion yen ($90 billion) in assets, will trim its holdings in hedge funds “slightly” this year from about 100 billion yen at the end of March, said Eisuke Shigemura, who runs the firm’s hedge-fund investment group. He declined to quantify the planned reduction.
Bloomberg – Camulos Capital LP, a hedge-fund firm founded by former Soros Fund Management LLC trader Richard Brennan, is in talks to have Mariner Investment Group run its business operations.
Mariner, an $11 billion firm managed by Bill Michaelcheck, may handle compliance, accounting and administration for Stamford, Connecticut-based Camulos, according to a June 30 investor letter obtained by Bloomberg News.
Businessandleadership.com – Just a year and a half after Microsoft paid US$240m for a 1.6pc stake in social-networking player Facebook, a Russian technology investor has paid US$200m for a 1.9pc stake in the company.
The Microsoft investment in September 2007 valued Facebook at US$15bn, while the latest investment from Russian investment group Digital Sky Technologies (DST) values the company at around US$10bn.
The Russian investment group founded in 2005 said it is even considering buying a further US$100m worth of shares in Facebook from existing investors.
Reuters – Vito Fossella, a former U.S. congressman representing sections of New York until a drunk driving conviction last year, has joined controversial hedge fund Superfund Investment Group, the Staten Island Advance reported this week. The community newspaper, citing unnamed sources, said Fossella’s role at the firm was not known. Superfund officials and Fossella were not available for comment.
Superfund is a managed futures investment firm that wants to make hedge funds available to the masses. Founder Christian Baha, a former Austrian police officer and college drop-out, stars in television commercials that poke fun at his inability to pronounce "investor."
Bloomberg – Octagon Capital Management Pte, run by former managers of the Government of Singapore Investment Corp.’s quantitative-investment group, plans to start a fund that seeks to profit from broad economic trends.
Octagon, which uses computer models to pick trades, will raise money “in the near future” for a quantitative macro fund that wagers on currencies, equities, interest rates and commodities in Asia, said Lam Poh Min, 39, co-founder of the Singapore-based hedge-fund firm, in an interview. The firm is looking for a “more opportune time” to start the fund, Lam said yesterday.
Times Online – Alex Salmond is under renewed pressure over his links with Sir George Mathewson, the former HBOS chairman, after it emerged that Sir George’s investment group’s hedge fund is running businesses from the Cayman Islands.
John McFall, the Labour chairman of the Treasury Select Committee, questioned Mr Salmond’s continuing use of Sir George as his chief economic adviser yesterday following the revelation.
Mr McFall said: “I am highly surprised that someone who appears to be avoiding paying tax in this country is an adviser to Alex Salmond. It is not in Scotland’s interests and sends very mixed messages to both bankers and the Scottish public.”
Interactive Investor - Man Group aims to win more business from big Asian investors such as pension funds and insurers even as global financial turmoil spurs some existing clients to redeem holdings and seek safety in cash.
The world’s largest listed hedge fund group recently hired an institutional salesperson in South Korea because of the potential it saw there and was studying the long-term opportunity in China, said Tim Rainsford, managing director, Asia Pacific for Man Investments.
"It’s certainly a challenging time. At the same time, the brakes are not on in the business. We will launch products when they’re appropriate," he told the Reuters Finance Summit on Monday.
The Olympian – Asian stock markets turned in a mixed performance Friday, but most recoiled from their lows despite a grim profit forecast from Toyota and sluggish U.S. economic data. European markets opened higher.
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Many of Asia’s bourses showed surprising resilience – notably in Hong Kong, South Korea and Singapore – given the overnight drop on Wall Street, as lower-priced shares attracted buyers and lending markets showed more signs of mending.
SEOUL (Reuters) – South Korea will allow mutual savings firms and online-based companies to sell investment funds from next February, and draw up measures to cut sales fees for long-term investors, a regulator said on Sunday.
The Financial Services Commission FSC.L said in a statement that it will also tighten investor protection rules for fund sellers to teach customers risks from an investment, as well as its commissions and fees.
"South Korea’s fund sales market has been in the oligopolistic structure, which lacked competition for services and commissions between sellers," the statement said.
Currently, only banks, securities houses and insurance companies are authorised to sell investment funds which accounted for nearly 10 percent of the country’s household financial assets in 2007.
