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 – Deutsche Bank said on Tuesday it had appointed David Murphy and Nathan Davison as co-heads of its prime finance unit in Asia as it looks to take a bigger share of the market amid the ongoing recovery in the hedge fund industry.
Davison who will join Deutsche Bank in November is moving from Merrill Lynch in London where he was a managing director while Murphy has been with Deutsche Bank since 2002, working in London and more recently New York where he was managing director.
Reuters – D.E. Shaw, the world’s fourth largest hedge fund, is opening in Dubai to tap public and private opportunities in the world’s largest oil exporting region and ease Gulf Arab investors moves into overseas markets.
“We wanted to be here because the region is home to many investors with deep regional knowledge and global reach,” Trey Beck, a managing director of D. E. Shaw & Co told Reuters.
Baltimore Business Journal – Former Aether Systems CEO David Oros has launched a $3 million hedge fund called Global Domain Vector Fund LLC, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing.
Oros is managing director and chief administrative officer of Baltimore’s Global Domain Partners LLC. He is joined by Jonathan Caplis, a director at Global Domain, as a managing member of the hedge fund, the filing says.
The fund was incorporated in 2005 and its first sale took place April 1, according to the Aug. 19 filing. It is accepting a minimum of $500,000 from outside investors.
Reuters – Harvard Management Co, which invests the Ivy League school’s multibillion dollar endowment, hired two investment managers away from two prominent hedge funds, the university said on Wednesday.
Emil Dabora, a senior managing director at Caxton Associates, will join as an equity portfolio manager while Michele Toscani, now at Fortress Investment Group, will join the international fixed income portfolio management team.
Bloomberg – Erik Verhaar, a former energy trader at Ospraie Management LLC and Deutsche Bank AG, started a hedge fund this week in the Netherlands as investors are returning to commodities.
His new Falckon Capital BV bets on U.K. natural gas and European power, emissions, coal and oil and has attracted one investor so far, Verhaar said yesterday in an interview.
Verhaar, 46, started at Cargill Inc. in 1987 as a cocoa trader and worked for Goldman Sachs Inc. and Nuon NV before joining Deutsche Bank in London in 2000, advancing to managing director for gas and power. He joined Ospraie’s biggest commodities fund in March 2008, six months before it closed in September last year. Verhaar’s energy investments at Ospraie gained 15 percent net of fees while he was there, he said.
Bloomberg – Kapstream Capital, Australia’s biggest fixed-income hedge fund, will almost double assets under management in the next month as pension funds seek returns in all market conditions.
The Sydney-based firm has secured investments that will take funds it oversees to A$1.2 billion ($965 million), from A$650 million, said founder Kumar Palghat, Pacific Investment Management Co.’s former head of portfolio management in Asia- Pacific. He aims to raise A$1.5 billion by end-2009 as investors switch to managers that made money even as global markets tumbled last year.
“People are recognizing that there are some opportunities in the credit space and they are more willing to start investing in them now,” said Robert Dasilva, managing director of Asia- Pacific fixed income in Sydney at Principal Global Investors, which manages $228 billion in assets globally.
Caymen Net News – Local hedge fund experts have reacted favourably to last week’s proposals by the Inspector General of the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to increase fund regulation.
The SEC has proposed that regulation of hedge funds and other investment advisors should be tightened in the wake of the SEC’s failure to stop Bernard Madoff’s $65 billion Ponzi scheme.
Don Seymour, former Head of the Investment Services Division of the Cayman Islands Monetary Authority (CIMA) and Managing Director of dms Management Ltd, said:
“These are meaningful suggestions that are worth consideration. If implemented, they would both enhance protections to investors and respect the privacy of private investment funds, in stark contrast to recent disclosure proposals put forward locally by individuals that do not address systemic risks and betray the private nature of investment funds.”
HedgeCo.net (West Palm Beach) – New York-based currency manager FX Concepts is launching a new Luxembourg-domiciled fund investing in its flagship Global Currency Program (GCP). The fund has been set up in conjunction with Deutsche Bank.
“Investor interest in active currency strategies has been very strong this year, and we’re delighted to make our Global Currency Program available to investors in UCITS format” said John R. Taylor, Chairman and CEO of FX Concepts. The new fund offers daily liquidity and has a €25,000 minimum ($35,000). Investments are fully collateralized and ring-fenced in accordance with the UCITS III directive. The fund will offer share classes in Euro, US Dollars, Sterling and Yen.
“In the current financial climate, investors are looking for strategies which offer maximum liquidity and transparency”, says Daniel Szor, Managing Director and head of FX Concepts’ London office. “FX fits these criteria very well, and now clients can participate through a fund which offers daily liquidity and minimized counterparty risk”.
The Global Currency Program invests in a diversified portfolio of 20-25 currency positions chosen from a universe of over 30 currencies. The program targets annualized returns of 10-15% with low volatility and has a track record of over eight years.
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Wall Street & Technology – Although talk of the swine flu has largely been out of the media for the past few weeks, a rush of new cases of the H1N1 virus is expected to hit financial centers in the fall and winter " and organizations, and in particular hedge funds, need to be well prepared for a pandemic.
Bob Guilbert, managing director of marketing and products at Eze Castle Integration (booth 1804), which provides outsourced IT technology and services for hedge funds, says his firm has been taking a proactive approach to the pandemic.
MONACO, June 17 (Reuters) – Investor flows out of the hedge fund industry have stabilised and the health of the industry has improved, GLG senior managing director Pierre Lagrange told Reuters on Wednesday.
‘Industry-wide they (flows) have stabilised,’ Lagrange said in an interview on the sidelines of the GAIM 2009 conference in Monaco. ‘You can see from performance that things are better.’
The hedge fund industry has suffered redemptions of around $250 billion between October and March as investors fretted over record poor performance last year.
New York Times – The managing director of a collapsed Chicago hedge fund, Lake Shore Asset Management, was indicted by a federal grand jury. Prosecutors say the director, Philip J. Baker, operated a $300 million fraud.
The 27-count indictment was unsealed on Monday, said Patrick J. Fitzgerald, a United States attorney, in a statement on Tuesday. An arrest warrant has been issued for Mr. Baker, but his whereabouts are unknown, Mr. Fitzgerald said.
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission accused Mr. Baker in a civil lawsuit last year of having defrauded at least 700 investors by hiding trading losses. The commission won court orders banning Lake Shore from commodities trading.
Mr. Baker said that Lake Shore had a long history of trading success, though it lost about $38 million from 2002 to 2007, according to the indictment.
Bloomberg – Hedge funds and other investors who short-sell shares in Britain’s financial companies must continue to disclose their trades, the U.K.’s financial regulator said.
A reporting requirement put in place by the Financial Services Authority in January will continue until new short- selling rules come into place, the agency said in a statement today. The requirement had been due to lapse on June 30. The new set of rules is expected to come into force in 2010.
“Keeping the disclosure requirements will continue to enhance transparency and limit the potential for market abuse, while details of a long-term regime for short-selling are being drawn up,” said Sally Dewar, the FSA’s managing director of wholesale and markets.
