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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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. […]

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 […]