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.
Reuters – Hedge funds stand to make gains from convertible bonds arbitrage again after last year’s huge losses decimated the sector, though improving markets have made the job more complicated.
Managers have been using a simple "buy and hold" strategy to ride a big bounce in depressed bond prices so far this year, enjoying gains of nearly 30 percent.
Gawker – Ron Insana left CNBC three years ago to run a hedge fund. Like Lou Dobbs and Steven Rattner before him, he learned that actually succeeding in business is not as easy as covering success in business. So now he’s begged a part-time reporting job from his old bosses. At least he’ll be able to share his Wall-Street-insider wisdom with viewers. Just like Jim Cramer!
Bloomberg – Before I quit my job trading bonds for my former Wall Street employer and set up my first hedge fund, I thought long and hard.
I stared at the ceiling every night, unable to sleep, and asked myself, over and over, many difficult questions. For example: “How sincerely do I want to grow my net worth from $10 million to $100 million?” And: “How much pleasure might be had from the envy of others?”
guardian.co.uk – The shadow business secretary, Kenneth Clarke, has become the latest victim of the credit crunch after losing his job on the board of a hedge fund, the Guardian has learned.
Clarke, who was parachuted back on to the Tory frontbench to beef up the party’s handling of the financial crisis, has been axed from the board of Centaurus Capital as the sector faces its worst crisis in decades.
The hedge fund, which like other investment companies faces huge withdrawals of cash from clients anxious about plunging stock markets, has scrapped its advisory board, which also included José María Aznar, the former Spanish prime minister.
Bloomberg – Yahoo! Inc. Chief Executive Officer Carol Bartz, who took the job yesterday, won’t get much of a honeymoon with the Internet company’s investors.
Shareholders are looking for Yahoo to rekindle talks with Microsoft Corp. or possibly sell off assets — anything that earns them a quick return. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said as recently as last week that he’s still open to a partnership with Yahoo, something that may be first on investors’ agenda.
Seattle Times – The big stories in the mutual-fund world are always taking shape, but the new year gives us a chance to gaze into the crystal ball to try to read future headlines.
Performance stories always rule the day — and I don’t make market forecasts, leaving that task to people willing to volunteer for the job of village idiot — so maybe it will be a good year if the economic crisis winds up serving as the backdrop for the developing stories, rather than continuing to dominate the news itself.
Here are the fund-world stories that could capture the headlines in the year ahead:
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.
