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 UK – Hedge fund LNG Capital is eyeing the debt of companies at risk of running short of cash, seeing the potential for high returns at an early stage of the credit crisis when companies are still able to tap rescue capital.
When a corporate borrower raises money or sells assets to get over a liquidity hump, its discounted short-term bonds — those maturing in up to 18 months — can become a buy, said the fund’s chief investment officer and founder, Louis Gargour.
The Guardian – Hedge fund LNG Capital is eyeing the debt of companies at risk of running short of cash, seeing the potential for high returns at an early stage of the credit crisis when companies are still able to tap rescue capital.
When a corporate borrower raises money or sells assets to get over a liquidity hump, its discounted short-term bonds — those maturing in up to 18 months — can become a buy, said the fund’s chief investment officer and founder, Louis Gargour.
Bloomberg – JO Hambro Capital Management Ltd., which oversees about $3.5 billion of assets, will close one of its two hedge funds partly because a bet against Volkswagen AG shares backfired, people familiar with the situation said.
The $240 million Trident European Fund dropped 25 percent in October, its worst month since starting a decade ago, mainly after a bet on a drop in Volkswagen shares went awry, said the people, who declined to be identified because the firm doesn’t disclose returns. The fund has slumped 39 percent this year after posting average returns of 8.4 percent annually since its inception.
Poor performance, dollar gains sapping European investment returns and investors moving assets from medium-sized companies all contributed to the fund’s closure, Suzy Neubert, a spokeswoman for JO Hambro in London, said in an e-mailed statement.
Irish Times – Seven international hedge funds have bet hundreds of millions of euro that Irish bank stocks will continue to fall.
Although it is normal stock market practice, since last Friday short-selling of the four Irish publicly quoted banks has been banned by the Irish Financial Services Regulatory Authority. While the regulator banned investors from taking new short positions, existing positions can be maintained, reduced or closed.
By maintaining their positions, the hedge funds are betting that Irish bank stocks, already at record lows, are set to fall further. As it is not clear when the initial share trades took place, brokers said the actual monetary value of the bets is unclear.
However, using yesterday’s closing prices, the seven funds hold positions worth €279 million in the four quoted Irish banks.
Five US and two London-based funds have disclosed their short positions.
Reuters – John Paulson, a U.S. hedge fund manager who gained a superstar reputation with a big bet against the U.S. housing market, was shown holding a 1 billion pound ($1.9 billion) bet against UK banks as short sellers were forced to disclose their positions.
Paulson & Co., run by John Paulson and based in New York, said it had a 1.2 percent short position in Barclays, worth over 350 million pounds, a 1.8 percent short position in Lloyds TSB, and short positions of just under 1 percent in Royal Bank of Scotland and HBOS.
The stakes were unveiled on Wednesday after Britain’s regulator imposed a ban on short-selling financial stocks last Friday, which was followed by similar moves in the United States and elsewhere.
Globe and Mail – A year ago, Dwight Anderson was being hailed as the "king of commodities," a precocious 40-year-old hedge fund manager who made a prescient – and highly profitable – bet that global food prices would spike in unprecedented fashion.
Now he is merely another in a long line of hard-luck speculators, his crown handed to him by a fickle commodities market that has proven itself capable of ruining fortunes as quickly as it created them.
In a letter to investors yesterday, Mr. Anderson announced he was shutting down the largest fund of Ospraie Management LLC, the firm he built into one of the largest commodities-themed hedge funds in the world. The Ospraie Fund, which focuses on natural gas, oil, metals and other resources, boasted assets of almost $4-billion (U.S.) at its peak last year, but so far in 2008 it is down 39 per cent – including a gut-wrenching 27-per-cent slide in August.
"I am extremely disappointed with this result and the fund’s sudden reversal in performance," Mr. Anderson wrote. "The losses were primarily caused by a substantial selloff in a number of our energy, mining and resource equity holdings during a six-week period characterized by some of the sharpest declines in these sectors in the past 10 to 20 years."
Times Online – The fashionable investment tactic of the past month – buying bank stocks while selling energy companies – could already have gone too far, Merrill Lynch, the financial management group, warned clients yesterday.
In mid-July, hedge funds, pension funds and other institutional investors dramatically reversed their enthusiasm for energy stocks and loathing for financials in an abrupt about-turn that sent bank shares soaring and oil and gas companies sinking.
But Merrill said yesterday that the unwinding of the classic bet of the credit crunch may already have been overdone, giving warning that banks across Europe could still be forced to raise between $70 billion (£37 billion) and $120 billion in new equity on top of the $120 billion already raised. Barclays and HBOS looked most vulnerable among UK banks to having to go back to their shareholders for more equity on top of the £4.5 billion and £4 billion, respectively, already raised.
Bloomberg- William Ackman, the activist hedge fund manager, increased his $2 billion bet on Target Corp. as shares of the second-largest U.S. discount retailer declined as much as 38 percent in the past year, according to two people with knowledge of the matter.
Pershing Square Capital Management LP, Ackman’s New York- based firm, added at least $100 million to the hedge fund it started last year to invest in Target. Ackman personally committed $5 million and solicited money from current and new investors, said the people, who declined to be identified because the fund is private.
The Independent- The American hedge fund group Harbinger Capital Partners revealed that it has made a significant bet on HBOS’s price falling, while its UK counterpart GLG admitted it is targeting the rival mortgage bank Bradford & Bingley, as investors were forced yesterday to disclose their short positions to the market for the first time.
The Financial Services Authority shocked the trading community a fortnight ago when it announced that investors would be compelled to disclose short positions of more than 0.25 per cent of share capital in companies carrying out rights issues.
The announcements started on Friday, and continued yesterday with 20 investors, predominantly hedge funds, disclosing short positions in seven companies that are in the process of carrying out rights issues.
Los Angeles Times – The hedge fund industry can only exist because investors believe their fund managers will deliver above-average returns over time, despite the portfolios’ hefty fees.
Master investor Warren Buffett, who has long derided those fees, now has made an interesting bet with a firm that runs so-called funds-of-hedge-funds: He’ll beat their net returns over the next decade simply by owning a mutual fund that tracks the Standard & Poor’s 500 index.
The bet is the subject of this article in Fortune magazine by Buffett’s long-time friend, writer Carol Loomis.
Buffett is going up against Protégé Partners LLC, a New York-based money manager that picks hedge funds for its clients.
Loomis writes: "Each side put up roughly $320,000. The total funds of about $640,000 were used to buy a zero-coupon Treasury bond that will be worth $1 million at the bet’s conclusion." Whichever side wins, the proceeds will go to charity.
