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Times Online – Britain’s leading share index stayed in negative territory in mid-morning trading after failing to shake off concern about rising US debt and growing fears that General Motors will file for bankruptcy protection by Monday.
The FTSE 100 was down 42.78 points at 4,373.45 by mid-morning, although the pound, which yesterday hit a seven-month high of $1.60, made up earlier overnight losses to trade at $1.5935.
Reuters – Edward Bonham Carter, chief executive of Jupiter Asset Management, is to stop running his Undervalued Assets fund after threatening last year to hand over the role if performance did not improve.
New hire Patrick Harrington, who joined Jupiter last week, will take over management of the fund at the end of the month, Jupiter said in a note on Monday.
Bonham Carter, a well-known figure in the fund management industry, has beaten the market and rival funds since he began running the fund eight years ago, but in more recent years performance has flagged.
Over the past five years the 122 million-pound fund has fallen 12.2 percent, while the average peer fund is down 4.3 percent and the FTSE All-Share index has risen 2.4 percent.
Times Online - Some of Britain’s most powerful fund managers are setting aside billions of pounds to fund cash calls from sound companies hamstrung by a lack of bank lending.
Investment bankers say that they have been inundated with calls from Britain’s biggest institutional investors over the past few weeks offering billions of pounds to fund the right recapitalisation deals. The institutional investors, corporate brokers say, are insisting that they be shown deals before private equity funds that are also waiting to snap up bargains.
Scottish Widows Investment Partnership, owned by Lloyds Banking Group, and M&G, owned by Prudential, the insurer, are among big investors ready to take up equity or debt of UK plc, whose shares have slumped in the past year. The FTSE all-share index is down almost 30 per cent over the period.
Reuters – Hedge fund manager CQS said on Thursday it had launched a new fund that will aim to profit from the volatility that has gripped global stock markets for much of the past year.
CQS, which had $9.6 billion (5.4 billion pounds) of assets under management at the start of August, said it had launched CQS Global Volatility Fund with an initial size of US$160 million.
The fund will use futures and options to trade volatility, with a primary focus on equity market indexes and on individual equities within the world’s major stock markets.
"The Fund aims to profit from valuation anomalies in equity volatility and from dislocations in markets. CQS believes that equity market volatility provides a consistent opportunity set to capture profits for investors," CQS said in a statement.
