FT Alphaville – Centaurus Capital is running down its flagship hedge fund after investors with the London activist failed to back an emergency restructuring. Centaurus, founded by former BNP Paribas traders Bernard Oppetit and Randy Freeman, will now repay the bulk of investors in the $1.2bn Centaurus Alpha fund, with only a handful expected to remain.

The failure to persuade half the investors to lock up their money until June, in return for lower fees, is a surprise as others – including the flagship funds of RAB Capital and Henderson – have won investor backing for similar proposals. 

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Tacoma News Tribune – Changes in winning and losing investments have come so swiftly of late that you might not have realized your favorite approach has backfired lately.

International funds – the hot funds of the last few years – have turned more disappointing than U.S. stock funds. Gold has lost its luster or, more precisely, more than $200 since reaching more than $1,000 an ounce a few months ago. Oil is in a bear market – a decline of 20 percent or more. Small-cap funds, which typically would be shunned during rough economic times, have been on a roll.

The last few weeks have shown why financial planners try to discourage clients from loading up on a few winners while discarding everything else. They know that changes in cycles can come quickly, and without warning, turning winners into losers and vice versa.

Many analysts are confessing their surprise at the twists of the last few weeks. It now appears that the globe is not immune from U.S. economic problems, although that was a favorite theory until a couple of months ago.

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