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Telegraph.co.uk – When Andy Hornby, the former chief executive of HBOS, was asked by the Treasury Select Committee to detail his banking qualifications he couldn’t. Like his fellow bankers, Sir Fred Goodwin, Sir Tom McKillop and Lord Stevenson, being questioned by the panel, Mr Hornby, had to admit publicly that he held no formal banking qualifications. However unlike his fellow bankers, Mr Hornby’s admission held one important qualification.
"I have an MBA from Harvard," he told the MPs, "where I specialised in all the finance courses including financial services."
With the question about qualifications almost certain to come up, Mr Hornby’s answer was almost certainly prepared. By referring not just to his MBA, but also to where he got it from, Mr Hornby knew he was putting himself firmly at the front of the pedagogical pecking order. Harvard prides itself on consistently being the highest-ranked university; Mr Hornby no doubt prides himself on being the highest-achieving student out of his year, coming top out of 800 peers.
SeekingAlpha.com – This is the Third Quarter 2008 edition of our ongoing hedge fund tracking series. Next up is Baupost Group ran by Seth Klarman.
Klarman received his MBA from Harvard Business School and started working at Baupost at age 25. Over the past 25 years, Baupost has seen an annual compound return of 20% and is ranked 49th in Alpha’s hedge fund rankings. Klarman has always considered himself a value investor and has been patient through the market turmoil.
The past few years the fund had nearly half of its $14 billion in assets in cash. But, with turmoil comes opportunity, and, as such, Baupost’s cash has been gradually deployed by Klarman and Baupost’s 100 employees, leaving it with around a fourth of its assets left in cash.
Seeking Alpha – Jana was recently ranked 79th in Alpha’s Hedge Fund Rankings. Jana was founded in 2001 and typically employs activist, market neutral, and long/short equity strategies in public equity markets. Rosenstein received his B.S. from Lehigh University and his MBA from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. Jana has returned 20.9% each year annualized from 2001 until 2007. Rosenstein sees Jana’s future in a strategy that uses management adjustments to force change at companies, which in turn can send shares higher.
A few months back in our hedge fund performance numbers update, we noted that Jana’s piranha fund was -19.2% for October and was -21.7% for the year at that time. Additionally, their Nirvana fund fell 13.2% in October and was down 21.9% ytd at that time. Lastly, the Jana Partners fund had a much better October than its other funds, being down 6.6% for that month, but was still down 20.4% for the year at that time. As you can see, a big chunk of its losses came solely from the month of October.
