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.
Bloomberg – Dear investor, our statutory obligations demand that we update you on how well we’ve taken care of your money here at Coin-Toss Investment Management.
Attached to this missive is a picture illustrating our fund’s performance this year, showing how wonderfully our back- to-basics approach is working after the derivatives-inspired lunacy of recent years. We’re calling our new strategy “mark- to-flatline” — slow and steady, it sure beats floundering on the double-black expert slopes of last year’s chaotic madness.
Globe and Mail – Hedge fund manager Ravi Sood is having a rough time navigating through the tsunami that has hit stock markets around the world.
The stellar record of his Lawrence Partners Fund suffered a 48-per-cent hair cut in September, sending its year-to-date loss to 53 per cent for the first nine months of 2008.
Mr. Sood would not comment about his fund, but told investors in a letter that he was forced to "reduce the size of core positions at inopportune levels in midmonth. …
"We cannot restore all of this year’s loss to date in the next few months or quarters, but we are confident we will get there," said the president of Toronto’s Lawrence Asset Management Inc.
Bloomberg – Komodo Capital Management Pte’s hedge fund outperformed rivals as Chief Investment Officer Angus Cameron employed strategies he developed during Japan’s slump in the 1990s to profit from the global financial turmoil.
The Singapore-based firm’s KC Asia Fund has gained 8.3 percent this year, Cameron said yesterday. Other macro hedge funds, which seek to profit from broad economic trends by trading currencies, bonds and stocks in the region, lost an average of 6.7 percent in the first nine months of the year, according to Eurekahedge, a Singapore-based data provider.
“We traded through Japan during the 1990s,” Cameron, 37, said in an interview. “The strategies that worked then will work now.”
Government bonds “should do well in most markets” as policy makers shift their focus to supporting growth from fighting inflation, Cameron said. Central banks from Australia to South Korea have joined a global effort to cut interest rates, following the year-long credit-market seizure that has toppled some of Wall Street’s biggest investment banks, including Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.
TIMES – The ups and downs of the Dow are making Wall Street’s so-called "smart money" look dopey. Hedge funds lost nearly $300 billion due to bad investments in the first nine months of the year, according to an analysis of return data by TIME.com.
If the losses stand it would be by far the worst year for these funds, which are unregulated and open only to high-net worth investors, since their returns began being tracked in the mid-1970s. "It’s not going to be a good year," says Peter Laurelli, vice-president at HedgeFund.net. "We can be pretty sure of that."
The calculation does not include gains some of the funds may have made in Monday’s rally, but analysts say that won’t be nearly enough to erase the hundreds of billions of dollars the funds are down. "The losses should concern every investor because these are supposed to be the smartest guys out there," says Charles Gradante, who is the co-founder of hedge fund advisory firm Hennesse Group. "If they can’t manage their investments how is average person with a 401(k) supposed to cope?"
Bloomberg – The Artradis AB2 fund, run by Singapore’s biggest hedge-fund firm, gained 4.96 percent in September, when Asian equities had their worst month in 18 years, two people with knowledge of its performance said.
The $2.2 billion hedge fund, managed by the firm’s co- founders Stephen Diggle and Richard Magides, returned 20.64 percent in the first nine months of the year, the people said, asking not to be identified because details are private. Asia’s hedge-fund average returns fell 16.2 percent this year, the region’s worst annual performance, according to Singapore-based data provider Eurekahedge.
Hedge funds such as those run by Artradis Fund Management Pte, which manages more than $4 billion, tend to outperform when markets are falling because they trade on volatility, which increases when prices decline. The 30-day volatility of the MSCI Asia-Pacific Index, a gauge of the average fluctuation of 990 stocks, has almost tripled to 55 percent, from 21 percent at the end of August.
