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.
Interactive Investor – The retreat of two high-profile activist funds from Japan underscores the difficulties such funds face in squeezing value from their investments and raises worries about lax corporate governance in the world’s second-biggest economy.
The Children’s Investment Fund (TCI) and Steel Partners have been scaling back since last year, joining a growing pool of foreign funds reducing exposure to Japan.
The departure also points to rising frustration among foreign funds that managers are not interested in maximising value, while domestic shareholders, often through complex cross-holdings, want to maintain the status quo.
Bloomberg – Bennelong Funds Management, an Australian fund manager with A$400 million ($271 million), will start a second hedge fund to ride through the financial crisis as it seeks to more than double funds under management.
Melbourne-based Bennelong wants to boost the assets it oversees to A$1 billion in the next three years, Jarrod Brown, chief executive officer, said yesterday in an interview in Sydney. Bennelong teamed up with Security Global Investors LLC to offer a long-short global equities fund in coming weeks to follow a long-only global fund the two began this month, he said.
SGI will manage the global funds under the Bennelong SGI name to gain access to Australia’s A$1.2 trillion dollar pool of managed funds after the $1.36 trillion hedge fund-industry shrank by more than 20 percent last year, and averaged losses of about 19 percent, the worst year on record.
Reuters – Broker-dealers such as Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs are losing out in the battle for hedge funds’ dwindling pool of assets, as funds seek out banks with diverse sources of funding in a major shake-up of prime broking.
The collapse of investment bank Lehman Brothers in September shocked hedge funds, as those with accounts at Lehman when it sought bankruptcy protection had those assets frozen and risked being unable to close trades.
