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Reuters India – Asian hedge funds were up a fourth straight month in June, rising an estimated 1.79 percent, on the strength of gains in Chinese and Japanese stocks, hedge-fund tracker Eurekahedge said.
The positive returns in June, which is based on preliminary data, brought gains since the start of 2009 to 13.96 percent.
Japan hedge funds gained 2.14 percent, North American funds edged up 0.60 percent, European funds lost 0.15 percent and Latin American funds returned 1.19 percent, the Singapore-based firm said in a statement on Wednesday.
Bloomberg – Darwin Capital Premier LS1 Fund, a hedge fund investing in Japanese stocks, has returned 31 percent since opening to investors in January as bets on companies including JP-Holdings Inc. and Daiken Medical Co. paid off.
The fund, advised by DarWin Capital Partners Ltd., began on Jan. 20 after running under a limited partnership structure since June 2006, according to Takafumi Sahoda, founding president of Darwin Capital in Tokyo. Prior to the January start, the strategy returned 224 percent in the 27 months through October 2008 compared with a 54 percent slide in the benchmark Nikkei 225 Stock Average in the same period, he said.
Bloomberg – Sumitomo Trust Finance (H.K.) Ltd., the asset-management unit of Japan’s fifth-biggest bank, will start a new multi-strategy hedge fund that invests in Japanese stocks, index options, futures and credit-default swaps.
The Tactical Equity Concepts-Japan Fund, also called TEC- Japan, will start June 29 with 10 billion yen ($105 million) of seed money from parent Sumitomo Trust & Banking Co., said Kota Murakami, the Hong Kong-based head of Sumitomo Trust Finance’s investment management group. The fund aims to raise assets to as much as 60 billion yen over the next couple of years, he said.
Bloomberg – The Children’s Investment Fund Management UK LLP, a $9.5 billion U.K. hedge fund, cut its short positions in Japanese stocks including Toshiba Corp. by almost $1 billion in less than two months, exchange filings show.
The London-based fund, also known as TCI, had about $248 million worth of short positions in 12 Japanese stocks, data based on exchange filings compiled by Bloomberg show, compared with about $1.2 billion on April 3.
TCI reduced its short positions in eight of 13 stocks including Sharp Corp., Japan’s biggest maker of liquid-crystal- display televisions, and Mizuho Financial Group Inc., Japan’s second-biggest bank by revenue, according to filings since April.
Bloomberg – The Children’s Investment Fund Management UK LLP, a $9.5 billion London-based hedge fund, has about $1.2 billion of short positions in Japanese stocks including Toshiba Corp., according to exchange filings.
The fund, better known as TCI, has shorted 13 Japanese stocks, data based on exchange filings compiled by Bloomberg show. Mizuho Financial Group Inc., Japan’s second-biggest bank by revenue, and Sony Corp., the world’s second-biggest consumer- electronics maker, are also among the short positions.
The bets against Japanese stocks by activist fund TCI, which lost a proxy battle with Japanese utility Electric Power Development Co. last year, come as the Nikkei 225 Stock Average completed its worst fiscal year since March 2001, losing 35 percent. TCI’s fund fell 43 percent in 2008, as global hedge funds were battered by client withdrawals and the worst market losses since the 1930s.
