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 – A federal judge in Florida ruled Wednesday that the head of two hedge funds deceived investors about the funds’ holdings. Elsewhere, federal regulators accused a California investment adviser of making tainted recommendations to clients.
In the Florida case, U.S. District Judge Kenneth Marra ruled that Michael Lauer, the head of Connecticut-based hedge funds Lancer Management Group and Lancer Management Group II, engaged in a fraud that cost investors about $500 million, according to the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Marra granted the SEC’s request for summary judgment against Lauer, finding that he overstated the hedge funds’ values from 1999 to 2002, manipulated the prices of seven securities that were an important part of the portfolios, and deceived investors about the funds’ holdings by providing them with fake financial statements.
Bloomberg – Stanley Shopkorn, a former head of equities trading at Louis Bacon’s Moore Capital Management LLC, plans to open a global stocks hedge fund, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter.
Hilltop Park Fund LP, based in New York, is scheduled to start trading Oct. 1, said the person, who asked not to be named because the fund is private. Shopkorn declined to comment.
Shopkorn, 65, has managed money for wealthy clients since leaving New York-based Moore Capital in 2002. Bacon hired him in 1996 to build the firm’s equities business. Before that, Shopkorn ran hedge fund Ethos Capital LP and was a vice chairman at Salomon Brothers.
“It’s not the best of times to start a new fund,” said Graziano Lusenti, founder of Nyon, Switzerland-based Lusenti Partners LLC, an investment adviser. “Investors have become more adverse to allocating capital to hedge funds given how their performance hasn’t been overwhelming this year.”
Washington, D.C., Jan. 3, 2008 – The Securities and Exchange Commission has received and posted on its Web site the text of the RAND Corporation’s final report on practices in the investment adviser and broker-dealer industries. The Commission has been anxious to receive RAND’s study of the investment adviser and broker-dealer industries, and the nature of their relationships with customers. The report will assist the Commission’s efforts to update our regulations to improve investor protections in today’s new marketplace," said SEC Chairman Christopher Cox. Our staff is now studying the report and the potential regulatory implications of its findings. RAND produced the report under contract with the Securities and Exchange Commission (http://www.sec.gov/news/press/2006/2006-162.htm). The report is the product of more than a year of empirical study and analysis. Following a March 2007 Court of Appeals decision that overturned a 2005 SEC rule permitting non-adviser broker-dealers to charge fees to investors based on account size, the SEC and RAND agreed that RAND would deliver its final, peer-reviewed report in pre-publication format on Dec. 31, 2007, three months earlier than the contract had originally required. The text of the posted report is final and has been peer-reviewed. Neither the data nor the analysis on which it is based will change.
