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Wall Street Journal Blogs – From its 17th-floor offices in the New Beijing Poly Plaza building, the monolithic landmark commissioned by the state-owned conglomerate China Poly Group Corp., China’s massive sovereign-wealth fund has established itself as a prime destination for overseas hedge-fund managers hoping to come home with big checks in their pockets.
Droves of hedge-fund and private-equity fund managers have made the pilgrimage since last year, when China Investment Corp. moved into its new offices, which is itself just two years old.
CIC, established in 2007, wields control over $200 billion, making it one of the world’s youngest but biggest sovereign-wealth funds. It also is emerging as one of the new hedge-fund emperors, a source of fresh cash for an industry thirsty for it.
Bloomberg – Asian hedge funds are attracting growing interest from investors as managers focusing on the region outperform global peers, said Andrew Hill, director of prime finance for Asia-Pacific markets at Citigroup Inc.
“There are pockets of proprietary money looking to be put to work in Asia,” Singapore-based Hill said in a June 12 interview. “There is going to be an outsized investment back into Asia. Some of the big pensions are going to be looking at Asia; it’s coming onto the radar screens.”
Asia-focused hedge funds gained 12.4 percent in the first five months of the year, outpacing returns in the U.S. and Europe, according to Eurekahedge Pte. That’s a reversal from last year, when clients withdrew almost $24 billion from the region’s hedge funds as managers posted bigger losses than global peers, the Singapore-based industry data provider reported.
NineMSN – The trustee overseeing the liquidation of disgraced financier Bernard Madoff’s assets sued another investment fund on Tuesday, claiming it owes Madoff’s victims more than $US1 billion ($A1.32 billion) it withdrew from his firm.
The complaint in Manhattan bankruptcy court alleges Harley International Ltd knew or should have known that the fortune came out of the pockets of victims of Madoff’s giant Ponzi scheme.
Of the $US1 billion ($A1.32 billion) total, the private, overseas hedge fund withdrew $US425 million ($A560.61 million) during the three months before his arrest last year.
Bloomberg – Compensation for U.S. hedge-fund employees may drop as much as 25 percent this year as the firms try to recoup last year’s investment losses.
The decline will cut hedge-fund paychecks to about half the record levels of 2007, according to estimates by Alan Johnson, founder of Johnson Associates Inc., a New York-based compensation-consulting firm whose clients include financial- services companies.
About 70 percent of the industry’s 6,800 so-called single- manager funds lost money in 2008 with the average fund dropping 19 percent, according to data compiled by Chicago-based Hedge Fund Research Inc. That means most clients don’t have to pay performance fees — generally 20 percent of profits — until the losses are made up. Many owners of the private partnerships will cover salaries out of their own pockets, or from pools set aside in previous years, to keep their best employees, Johnson said.
West Palm Beach (HedgeCo.net) – Hedge funds returned a healthy 1% in January, wrapping up a tumultuous 2008 at -12.3%, according to Eurekahedge. Hedge fund assets fell $380 billion or 20% in 2008, from just under $1.9 trillion to just over $1.5 trillion.
Eurekahedge’s forecast expects to see more hedge fund start-ups in the near future, given the increasing number of people moving out of investment banks (whether voluntarily or otherwise) to venture into the hedge fund space.
In terms of returns, hedge funds are in a better position to generate superior returns than most other conventional managers and market players, owing to the flexibility that hedge fund managers enjoy, the Eurekahedge report says, their ability to identify new trends and investment ideas and act on them promptly.
"We anticipate trend-following strategies to continue benefiting from market movements across the currency and commodity markets, as they had through most of 2008. We expect the equity markets to remain volatile and range-bound over the next few months, but long/short managers could potentially benefit from pockets of opportunities (even if short-term ones) on both the long and the short side, given the uncertainty around the 4Q08 earnings reports and deeply discounted valuations across most sectors."
