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.
Bloomberg – Bill Schultheis, amateur mountaineer and investment adviser, says there’s more to life than staring at stock market screens.
His new book, “The New Coffehouse Investor,” says the path to success consists of the following: Get a game plan built around low-cost index funds and revisit it periodically to see if it can maintain your lifestyle in retirement.
The explosion in the number of exchange-traded index funds has created confusion among investors, Schultheis says, with Wall Street caught up in beating the market by using “thin slices” such as sector funds. Investors also need to put performance in perspective by investing in broad index funds and staying with them, the author says.
Reuters – Prominent hedge fund investor Mark Yusko on Monday warned endowments against putting the bulk of their money into stocks, arguing that these assets perform only when economies are growing.
For years most investors ranging from big institutions to average Americans saving for college and retirement have bet mostly on the U.S. stock market.
But in the wake of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, Yusko, who worked with two large college endowments before founding his own firm, Morgan Creek Capital, said investors need to change their thinking.
Tacoma News Tribune – Tucked among the hedge funds and the famous names on Bernard Madoff’s client roster is an unlikely group of about 800 people – strangers to one another, yet all listed at the same anonymous Denver address.
Now, they are discovering a painful common bond, shared with at least two previous groups of stung investors. For at least the third time in as many years, the company behind Denver PO Box 173859 has turned up as a go-between in a collapsed Ponzi scheme.
The address belongs to Fiserv Inc., which served as middleman for Madoff and scores of regular Joe-and-Jill investors: dentists and doctors, insurance salesmen and builders who trusted Madoff to manage specialized individual retirement accounts.
Their losses with Madoff, together with earlier cases, raise questions about Fiserv and the risks inherent in what are known as self-directed IRAs. These financial products are an increasingly popular way of letting people invest in real estate or small businesses and other less-traditional investments.
ABC Action News – “I feel sick to my stomach. I don’t sleep well at night; I am up and down every couple of hours.
Leslie Collier was on the verge of retirement until she discovered a week ago that her $600,000 investment with Scoop Management and the man who handled her money, Art Nadel, are missing.
Since then Collier and her husband Larry say it’s just been one thing after another,
“As time goes on I get madder and madder about it because I was totally ripped off
Hedge Fund Net – Alternative investment strategies around the world are trudging through a slowdown, but that is not scaring away the world’s organization, the United Nations, from investing in these areas. The United Nations Joint Staff Pension Fund (UNJSPF) is set to move forward with plans to put its money into hedge funds and private equity funds.
The UNJSPF was established by the United Nations General Assembly in 1949 to provide retirement, death, disability and related benefits for staff of the U.N. and the other organizations admitted to membership in the fund, according to the UNJSPF Web site. As of Dec. 31, 2004 the fund served 20 member organizations with more than 88,350 active participants and nearly 53,000 beneficiaries.
istockAnalyst.com- Investors face something of a new landscape in financial markets this week after tumbling oil and food prices eased immediate concerns about inflation, potentially freeing central banks to fight slow economic growth.
The focus, however, will also be on some old stalwarts – a continuing stream of corporate earnings reports and the U.S. employment report for July, a monthly bellwether for the health of the American economy.
The past two weeks have seen major declines on commodity markets, which until recently were booming. They had provided investors with gains but also headaches because of the impact of higher prices on companies and economies.
That has now turned around. Since hitting a record above $147 a barrel on July 11, oil has fallen 15 percent.
Food prices have seen similar moves. Wheat is down 18 percent in the past month while corn has lost 25 percent.
From a broad investor perspective, this can be good news, assuming it continues.
