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Bloomberg – Pandora Media Inc., the free online- radio service that generates playlists based on users’ musical preferences, aims to be profitable next year for the first time since the company started in 2000, founder Tim Westergren said.
Revenue may double this year to about $40 million, Westergren, 43, said in an interview yesterday in San Francisco. The advertising-supported service has 27 million registered users and is adding members at 50,000 to 60,000 a day, faster than in previous years, he said.
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.
Reuters- Melissa Ko, a former star trader at Bear Stearns, has formed a new hedge fund called Covepoint Capital with nearly $1 billion in assets, according to a letter the firm sent to investors on Monday.
Ko ran Bear’s Emerging Markets Macro Fund, which generated returns of more than 25 percent from 2005 to 2007 through currency, sovereign debt, equity and other investing strategies. New York-based Covepoint has assets of about $925 million, mainly from previous investors in the Bear fund.
Covepoint is the latest hedge fund to become independent from the former Bear Stearns Asset Management (BSAM) division, a collection of funds which held about $27 billion in assets when JPMorgan Chase & Co bought the crippled investment bank on May 30.
