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.
Chicago Tribune – Citadel Investment Group is covering "a substantial portion" of its operating expenses this year, a break from passing those costs on to clients, Katie Spring, a spokeswoman for the Chicago-based hedge fund, said Thursday.
"We felt it was the right thing to do." Spring said, citing Citadel’s "long-standing relationship with our investors."
Citadel declined to specify how much of the costs it would absorb, but estimates range from $200 million to $300 million. When management fees were high relative to returns in 2005, Citadel founder Ken Griffin reimbursed investors. The hedge fund will again start charging its standard fees in January.
Citadel’s two largest funds have suffered losses of almost 50 percent through November. Assets under management total around $13 billion and clients have requested about $1 billion worth of redemptions. Hedge funds typically finance operations by taking 2 percent of assets, then retaining 20 percent of profits to pay employee performance bonuses. Citadel bills investors for expenses, which can represent as much as 8 percent of assets, and keeps 20 percent of profits. Among expenses charged to investors are annual bonuses to Citadel employees, according to people familiar with the hedge fund.
Bloomberg – Citadel Investment Group LLC, the hedge fund manager founded by Kenneth Griffin, will close down its Tokyo office and Asian principal investments operations, cutting more than half of jobs in the region.
Citadel will run its remaining Asian operations from Hong Kong in the future after shutting the regional principal team that invests in companies undergoing or about to go through mergers and acquisitions, spinoffs, asset sales or legal challenges. Katie Spring, a spokeswoman in Citadel’s Chicago head office, confirmed the decision today.
Hedge funds globally are cutting jobs, limiting withdrawals and liquidating funds as a credit crunch and a 46 percent drop in the MSCI World Index in 2008 put them on course for the worst year on record. Hedge funds have lost 18 percent this year, according to Chicago-based Hedge Fund Research Inc.
Bloomberg – Millennium Partners LP, the $13.5 billion hedge-fund firm run by Israel Englander, plans to return $1 billion to investors who asked for their cash back by year-end, according to two people familiar with the matter.
The redemptions, equal to 7.4 percent of client assets, would have been higher except the New York-based firm limits redemptions in any quarter, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the information is private. A spokeswoman for Millennium declined to comment.
Millennium lost about 3 percent this year through October, the people said, compared with hedge funds’ average decline of 16 percent, according to data compiled by Hedge Fund Research Inc. Two percentage points of Millennium’s loss were caused by assets frozen in the September bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., one of the people said.
Bloomberg – JO Hambro Capital Management Ltd., which oversees about $3.5 billion of assets, will close one of its two hedge funds partly because a bet against Volkswagen AG shares backfired, people familiar with the situation said.
The $240 million Trident European Fund dropped 25 percent in October, its worst month since starting a decade ago, mainly after a bet on a drop in Volkswagen shares went awry, said the people, who declined to be identified because the firm doesn’t disclose returns. The fund has slumped 39 percent this year after posting average returns of 8.4 percent annually since its inception.
Poor performance, dollar gains sapping European investment returns and investors moving assets from medium-sized companies all contributed to the fund’s closure, Suzy Neubert, a spokeswoman for JO Hambro in London, said in an e-mailed statement.
New York (HedgeCo.Net) – Citadel Investment Group announced yesterday it will shut down its $1 billion fund of hedge funds portfolio and use the capital to invest in other businesses.
The Fusion fund was launched a year and a half ago, with nearly 95 percent of the capital coming entirely from Citadel. The money will be used to invest in businesses that finance new asset managers. The remaining 5 percent of capital will be returned to investors.
"We have seen strong interest in the incubation and seeding strategies that we’ve developed," Katie Spring, spokeswoman for Citadel told Bloomberg News. "We believe these will be important components of expanding investment talent over the years to come.”
This move comes after months of swirling rumors that the $18 billion firm, headed by Kenneth Griffin, may not be able to weather this year’s credit crisis. Citadel’s largest fund, the $10 billion Kensington Global Strategies, has fallen 30 percent this year stemming from losses tied to convertible bonds.
Seeding has seen a spike in popularity in recent years. It involves focusing on new and emerging funds and fund managers in hopes of someday partaking in profit sharing once the fund experiences success. Seeding is something that new hedge funds generally seek out if start-up capital isn’t readily available, to help get their fund off the ground. New hedge funds may receive anywhere from half a million dollars to several hundred million dollars.
Julie Scuderi Senior Editor for HedgeCo.Net Email: julie@hedgeco.net
Business Day South Africa – Examiners with the US Federal Reserve have questioned Wall Street counterparties about their exposure to debt and other holdings of Citadel Investment Group, The Wall Street Journal reported at the weekend.
Citadel denied the report.
Citing people familiar with the matter, the j ournal said the Fed questioned the counterparties in at least two instances in recent days.
But Katie Spring, a spokeswoman for Citadel, denied the rumours that the Fed had spoken to the hedge fund’s counterparties specifically about Citadel and possible problems with its debt.
Bloomberg – Harry Tyser, manager of the $100 million New Star Firefly Hedge Fund in London, was still trading while being wheeled into the operating room for kidney- stone surgery.
“It’s life and death out there right now,” said Tyser, 40, who used his mobile phone to call in sales before his July procedure. “You need to keep moving your feet in markets like this. There are moments in life to make money and moments where the secret is just not to lose it.”
Tyser’s fund, which bets on rising and falling stocks, returned 3.7 percent last month, according to investors. Few rivals were as fortunate as the average hedge fund fell 6.9 percent, the biggest one-month loss in a decade, according to Hedge Fund Research Inc.’s HFRX Global Index.
Managers who did post profits last month include John Horseman, whose $3.2 billion Horseman Global stock fund rose 5.7 percent, bringing the gain this year to 15 percent, investors said. Carol Brown, a spokeswoman for Horseman Capital Management LP in London, declined to comment.
Reuters – Hedge fund Ore Hill Partners, which specialises in credit strategies, has barred clients from redeeming their money from its flagship offering, imposing a freeze just as investors clamored for an exit, the company said on Friday.
The firm, half owned by Man Group, the world’s largest publicly traded hedge fund, put up a so-called gate provision on its roughly $1.2 billion (650 million pound) Ore Hill International portfolio this week, limiting the amount of withdrawals after investors sought the return of roughly $300 million, said an investor who asked not to be identified.
Heavy redemptions for September triggered an automatic gate, said Sophie Sophaon, a spokeswoman for the fund. Fund directors are considering what measures to take that will be in the best interest of all investors, she added.
Reuters – The commodity half of oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens’s BP Capital hedge fund lost 35 percent of its value in July, the New York Post said, citing sources.
The fund is believed to be down about 10 percent for the year, the paper said.
A Pickens spokeswoman told the paper that commodity-fund investors were informed that the steep decline in natural gas and oil prices has had an adverse impact on its performance.
"We continue to analyze the market and adjust accordingly," the spokeswoman was quoted as saying.
Fort Worth Star Telegram- Citadel Investment Group is bullish on RadioShack, buying 6.9 million shares, or 5.3 percent of the electronics retail chain’s stock, according to a federal filing Monday.
With the purchase, the Chicago-based hedge fund becomes the fourth-largest holder of RadioShack stock — but the only one of the top seven that has been buying, not selling.
Why RadioShack, which is attempting a turnaround?
Citadel wouldn’t say. "We don’t comment on positions," spokeswoman Katie Spring said.
The filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission indicated that Citadel was not contemplating a takeover. Rather, reports described the purchase as a passive investment with no intent of influencing the company.
Reuters- John Templeton, a pioneering mutual fund manager, global investor and billionaire philanthropist, died of pneumonia in a hospital in the Bahamas on Tuesday, a spokeswoman at his foundation said. He was 95.
Templeton, who started his career on Wall Street in 1937, created several successful international funds before selling Templeton Funds in 1992 to Franklin Resources for $440 million (223 million pounds) in what was then the largest acquisition of an independent mutual fund company.
He remained deeply involved in his business until he was nearly 80, when he shifted focus to philanthropy. "People keep noticing that I’m 79 years old, and ask me what would happen if I would die," he told Reuters in an interview in 1992 while negotiating the sale of his firm.
Bloomberg- Hunter Shively, global co-head of UBS AG’s commodities business for the past seven months, is resigning to join a start-up hedge fund that is raising money to trade energy futures.
Shively, 38, will stay on for two months to oversee the handover of the commodities unit’s North American energy operations, Jerker Johansson, head of UBS’s investment bank, said today in a memo to employees. Todd Morakis, who was named commodities co-head with Shively in November, will run the Stamford, Connecticut-based unit, according to the memo, which was confirmed by Sarah Small, a spokeswoman for UBS in London.
UBS, which has had the biggest net losses of any bank from the U.S. subprime-mortgage crisis, said in January it will reduce trading in power and natural gas in Canada, and pull out of some European energy markets. Shively plans to join Sasco Energy Partners LLC, a Westport, Connecticut-based firm that is looking to raise $750 million, according to a person familiar with the matter who declined to be identified.
