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.
European Voice – Europe may be laying the foundations for the next financial bubble, through its monetary, industrial and regulatory policies.
In the midst of the worst crisis in half a century, it is easy to forget that the real problem is not the bust but what preceded it: a boom filled with bad investments.
The boom was a natural consequence of too much easy money for too long. That policy was itself a response to the bursting of the dotcom bubble, to which Alan Greenspan and the Federal Reserve responded by cutting interest rates from 6.5% to 1% – and keeping them that low for a whole year. The result was a market drowned in cheap money.
Opalesque – Launching in July 2007 with internal funds and the strength of a single seed donor New York-based MM Capital waded directly into the oncoming financial crisis with $6m in assets under management.
In the midst of historic industry wide asset declines the firm has managed to raise their asset levels to approach $50m (up 700%), and serves as a reminder amidst the asset raising doom and gloom that solid performance does indeed draw investor attention.
Xconomy – Vertex Pharmaceuticals has been around the block with biotech hedge funds. These are the people who aim to get rich trading volatile stocks second-to-second, and make big bets, long or short, on whether an experimental drug will work. Now that Vertex has passed some of the riskiest stages of drug development, the company figured it was time for steady, buy-and-hold investors to support the next phase, as it morphs into a commercial player.
That was one of the insights that I gathered yesterday in a conversation with Vertex chief financial officer Ian Smith. He was in a pretty good mood—as you might be too, if you’d just helped your company raise $320 million in a secondary stock offering. The financing is important because it gives Vertex (NASDAQ: VRTX) enough cash to operate until it introduces its lead drug to the market and starts generating positive cash flow, according to analyst Thomas Russo of Robert W. Baird & Co. Especially in the midst of a recession, that’s good news for Vertex’s 1,300 employees in Cambridge, MA, and 200 in San Diego.
Cornell Daily Sun – In the midst of the country’s economic recession, the Johnson Graduate School of Management’s Cayuga Fund, a hedge fund run by faculty and students, reported a 0.42 percent gain for the 2008 business year.
Although the fund’s investments decreased by 1.29 percent in the fourth quarter, this $12 million hedge fund, finished the year ahead, especially relative to the performance of its benchmarks. Indexes like Hedge Fund Research Equity Hedge Index and the Hedge Fund Research Equity Market Neutral Index reported 25.45 percent and 1.16 percent losses, respectively, in 2008.
Washington Post – The European Union will this week take the first step toward new rules governing high-risk hedge funds, the EU’s financial services chief said Monday.
EU Commissioner Charlie McCreevy, long opposed to regulating the funds, is bowing to calls from the G-20 group of the world’s leading industrialized and emerging economies and many European politicians for more oversight for hedge funds that invest large sums and often operate in near secrecy.
He said the European Commission would consult European financial firms and others, sparking a debate that might see regulators eventually come up new rules.
He said he wanted to focus on the risks hedge funds might pose to the financial system if current rules were left in place. EU regulators also have to define hedge funds and consider how they should deal with hedge funds based in jurisdictions with little supervision, he said.
Bloomberg – Ritchie Capital Management and Thane Ritchie, the hedge fund manager’s principal, were sued by Barclays Bank Plc over accusations they concealed more than $150 million in investments made in the collapsed Petters Group Worldwide LLC and affiliates.
Now bankrupt, Petters Group, based in Minnetonka, Minnesota, was raided in September by FBI agents acting on information that the company may have cheated at least 20 investors. Principal Tom Petters, accused of leading a $2 billion fraud, is being held without bail in a Minnesota jail.
“Thane Ritchie made the decision to invest significant sums” from two of his firm’s hedge funds with Petters, at a time when those funds “were supposed to be winding down,” Barclays said in a complaint filed Nov. 18 in Illinois state court in Chicago.
Washington Post – That is the technical economic term that best sums up a day in which the House of Representatives refuses to pass a $700 billion rescue plan pushed by the White House and congressional leaders from both parties, Wachovia is taken over in a deal that will have the government potentially owning 10 percent of Citigroup, a few European banks fail, the Federal Reserve and other central banks are forced to inject an additional $300 billion into the global banking system, the Dow Jones industrial average plunges 778 points, and investors everywhere rush to the safety of gold and short-term Treasury bills.
The basic problem here is that too many people don’t understand the seriousness of the situation.
Americans fail to understand that they are facing the real prospect of a decade of little or no economic growth because of the bursting of a credit bubble that they helped create and that now threatens to bring down the global financial system.
