Bloomberg – Van Biema Value Partners LLC, led by a former Columbia Business School professor, started a new fund to invest in Asian hedge funds while plunging markets and client withdrawals force rivals to scale back investments.

The Cayman Islands-domiciled van Biema Asia Value Fund Ltd. started on Aug. 1 with about $215 million from one of the company’s institutional clients, van Biema said in a statement issued through PR Newswire yesterday.

“Our niche, the value discipline, has demonstrated, over the long term, significant outperformance over market benchmarks,” the statement said.

Michael van Biema, who taught finance subjects including value investing at Columbia Business School from 1992 before founding his partnership in 2004, started the Asia fund as market declines and the worst hedge fund performance in 19 years force other funds of hedge funds to reduce investments and switch to cash to cope with investor redemptions.

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Bloomberg – Komodo Capital Management Pte’s hedge fund outperformed rivals as Chief Investment Officer Angus Cameron employed strategies he developed during Japan’s slump in the 1990s to profit from the global financial turmoil.

The Singapore-based firm’s KC Asia Fund has gained 8.3 percent this year, Cameron said yesterday. Other macro hedge funds, which seek to profit from broad economic trends by trading currencies, bonds and stocks in the region, lost an average of 6.7 percent in the first nine months of the year, according to Eurekahedge, a Singapore-based data provider.

“We traded through Japan during the 1990s,” Cameron, 37, said in an interview. “The strategies that worked then will work now.”

Government bonds “should do well in most markets” as policy makers shift their focus to supporting growth from fighting inflation, Cameron said. Central banks from Australia to South Korea have joined a global effort to cut interest rates, following the year-long credit-market seizure that has toppled some of Wall Street’s biggest investment banks, including Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.

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