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Philadelphia Inquirer - Pension funds for Pennsylvania state workers and schoolteachers lost more than $12 billion in the three months ended Sept. 30.
And that’s not counting losses from hedge funds, real estate, private equity, and other hard-to-trace private investments - roughly half of the State Employees’ Retirement System - that pension managers don’t plan to disclose until next year.
Using commodities to hedge potential losses in stock markets has not worked lately, and the tighter link among assets these days means diversification benefits may not be as great as before.
Hedge funds, pension funds, mutual funds and wealthy individuals who invested in commodities on the theory that they move independently of other asset classes watched helplessly as the global economic nosedive turned commodities, once the top asset class, into the year’s worst performer after equities.
Those who have studied commodities and longtime investors in energy, metals and grains say that in ordinary times, these markets make good alternatives to stocks.
Bloomberg - Hedge-fund assets may fall to about $1 trillion by the middle of next year, a decline of almost 50 percent from their peak in June, because of market losses and client withdrawals, Citigroup Inc. said in a report.
Managers are likely to see investors, led by funds of funds, pull 20 percent of their money, Tobias Levkovich, an analyst at the New York-based bank, wrote yesterday. Funds of funds are middlemen who select hedge funds for their clients.
“The so-called `Swiss hot money’ wants out and funds are responding,” Levkovich wrote, referring to Swiss investors who have a shorter investing period than pension funds. “Citi’s credit analysts estimate that hedge funds have raised cash to roughly 40% of assets already in anticipation of known redemptions and possibly unanticipated demands from investors.”
Hedge funds lost an average of 16 percent this year through October, according to data compiled by Hedge Fund Research Inc., as stock and commodity markets tumbled and lending tightened. The industry has lost money in only one year — a 1.45 percent decline in 2002 — since the Chicago-based firm began tracking returns in 1990.
Reuters - The days of hedge funds as a red-hot asset class may be cooling, according to a new survey released by fund research firm Morningstar on Monday.
Nearly half of all financial advisers who help wealthy people invest their money said they expect hedge funds to become somewhat less or much less important in clients’ portfolios in the next five years. Among institutional clients like pension funds, 37 percent of those polled said they expect hedge funds to become somewhat less or much less important.
Wealthy investors and pension funds helped hedge fund industry assets double to $1.7 trillion in the last three years, but recently the loosely regulated portfolios have disappointed investors with their worst-ever returns.
Interactive Investor - Man Group aims to win more business from big Asian investors such as pension funds and insurers even as global financial turmoil spurs some existing clients to redeem holdings and seek safety in cash.
The world’s largest listed hedge fund group recently hired an institutional salesperson in South Korea because of the potential it saw there and was studying the long-term opportunity in China, said Tim Rainsford, managing director, Asia Pacific for Man Investments.
"It’s certainly a challenging time. At the same time, the brakes are not on in the business. We will launch products when they’re appropriate," he told the Reuters Finance Summit on Monday.
Newark Star-Ledger - Prompted by criticism from a prominent state lawmaker, the head of the state’s Division of Investment yesterday defended his decision to invest $144 million in pension funds in a BlackRock Inc.-managed hedge fund in the past two weeks, saying the state needed to act quickly to protect its stake and possibly reap big returns.
Senate President Richard Codey (D-Essex) questioned the transparency of the process, taking issue with the state putting $49.5 million in the hedge fund on Oct. 17 — an amount just shy of the $50 million threshold that requires a review by the state Investment Council. On Friday, the state invested another $94 million in pension funds in the BlackRock venture, following a special meeting of the Investment Council.
Reuters - Wealthy investors are cutting back exposure to hedge funds after disappointing returns but are not exiting the sector wholesale, and are likely to come back again once markets have calmed down.
High net worth individuals have been key drivers of the rapid growth of the $2.6 trillion industry. Many invested in free-wheeling portfolios well before institutions such as pension funds decided to go in.
But a dire year of performance is presenting hedge funds with their greatest-ever test — Hedge Fund Research’s HFRI index fell 4.68 percent in September, its second worst month ever, taking the year-to-date loss to 9.41 percent.
Still, given the battering equity markets have taken — the FTSE 100 .FTSE fell 24 percent in the nine months to end-September and has since fallen further — wealth managers say they are not deserting the asset class completely.
Reuters - Britain’s new Personal Accounts scheme, a plan for savers without a company pension, is "highly unlikely" to invest in hedge funds and private equity, said the head of the authority in charge of setting up the scheme.
The investment portfolio of the Personal Accounts scheme, which is set to grow to 150 billion pounds ($279 billion) in 50 years’ time, has not been decided, although the scheme has said its default fund is likely to consist mainly of index-tracking funds.
Tim Jones, chief executive of the Personal Accounts Delivery Authority (PADA), told Reuters on the sidelines of an industry conference: "My personal view is that it highly unlikely because that’s not where our low to middle income earners are."
Hedge funds, which have been blamed for adding to current market volatility due to their role in short-selling stocks, are viewed by pension funds as a diversifier, although returns have been disappointing for many investors this year.
Jones also said the scheme is likely to offer around a dozen funds for savers to select from.
Wall Street Journal - With anxiety about hedge-fund woes gripping the market, funds have their own fear: their investors.
Some investors, particularly what are known as "funds of funds," are demanding their money back and may ramp up requests in the weeks ahead. That has prompted hedge-fund managers to sell securities to raise cash.
"As the hedge fund investor base broadens, hedge fund portfolio management…slips out of the hands of the portfolio managers and into the hands of the investors," wrote Andrew Redleaf, who runs Whitebox Advisors, a Minneapolis hedge fund with about $5 billion under management, in an August client letter. "It is no insult to the investors to say that this worsens performance."
Funds-of-funds select hedge funds on behalf of pension funds, wealthy individuals or other investors, and charge a layer of fees on top of the hefty fees levied by hedge funds themselves. They often ask hedge funds for the option to redeem money as often as monthly and get good terms because they can bring in big chunks of cash at once.
Folks, I want to share some information with you on "hedge funds."
I have wanted to do this for some time now, but it seems each week some other topic pushes this one aside.
Hedge funds are simply large - no, huge is a better term - piles of money. The very rich and very large institutions, like pension funds and banks, give billions of dollars to a "money manager" to play with. These funds aren’t used to produce anything. They are mainly for the manipulation of markets.
Hedge funds are the least regulated of all money institutions. That in itself is scary because when we deregulated the savings and loan industry, greed cost the taxpayer, you and me, in the neighborhood of $750 billion. Then, when we deregulated the banking industry, it cost us, the taxpayers, $500 billion to save banks from their own greed. This was the recent sub-prime mortgage fiasco. And of course the sub-prime problem not only cost taxpayers, it also cost home owners a number too large to write in this space, in lost home value.
Times Online - The fashionable investment tactic of the past month - buying bank stocks while selling energy companies - could already have gone too far, Merrill Lynch, the financial management group, warned clients yesterday.
In mid-July, hedge funds, pension funds and other institutional investors dramatically reversed their enthusiasm for energy stocks and loathing for financials in an abrupt about-turn that sent bank shares soaring and oil and gas companies sinking.
But Merrill said yesterday that the unwinding of the classic bet of the credit crunch may already have been overdone, giving warning that banks across Europe could still be forced to raise between $70 billion (£37 billion) and $120 billion in new equity on top of the $120 billion already raised. Barclays and HBOS looked most vulnerable among UK banks to having to go back to their shareholders for more equity on top of the £4.5 billion and £4 billion, respectively, already raised.
Reuters Singapore - U.S.-based Russell Investments, which manages over $211 billion (110 billion pounds) in assets, wants to boost its exposure to Asian real estate as it sees growing markets in China and India withstanding a global downturn.
The company, which raises money from institutions such as pension funds and invests it with other fund managers, said it expects to more than double its investments in Asia properties over the next three years, from about $300 million currently.
"Our clients tell us they want to be in Asia property, and we go where our clients want to go," said Martin Lamb, newly appointed Asia Pacific head of property for Russell, the funds and indices unit of Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance.