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.
Globe and Mail – The ranks of the world’s millionaires shrank at the fastest rate in 2008, with North America suffering the biggest wealth loss worldwide, according to a survey by Capgemini SA and Merrill Lynch & Co.
The global slump in property and equity markets last year cut the number of millionaires by 15 per cent to 8.6 million, wiping out two years of increases, the firms said in their 13th annual World Wealth Report published Wednesday. The value of the world’s millionaires’ assets slid 20 per cent to $32.8-trillion (U.S.), after a 9.4-per-cent increase the previous year, the survey said.
Stuff – Hedge fund firm Pure Capital plans to launch a range of funds, including products playing food and carbon markets.
Anthony Limbrick, chief investment officer of the New Zealand-based firm, told Reuters the Pure Carbon fund, which will be seeded with the firm’s money, will trade in the European carbon market and have an initial capacity of $US20 ($NZ32) million.
He said the fund will aim to grow as the carbon market evolves, but is also ready to exploit the possibility of a slump in the segment.
"We think there’s a 30 percent chance the market collapses … That could create a `fat tail’ (a very rare event with major consequences) for us to make money," he said in an interview at the GAIM 2009 hedge fund conference.
Bloomberg – Commoditrade Inc. plans to introduce an energy hedge fund in the fourth quarter, complementing a fund that invests in industrial metals.
The new fund will use the relative-value strategy followed by the metals fund, Chief Executive Officer David Phipps said yesterday in a phone interview. He declined to comment on the performance of the metals fund, the AMCO Commodity Fund, which Georgetown, Grand Cayman-based Commoditrade bought in February.
Commoditrade and competitors are opening energy funds as oil futures listed in New York rebound from the worst slump ever. Galena Asset Management Ltd. started an energy hedge fund this month that it said may expand to more than $1 billion. Andrew Serotta, who worked for Vitol Group, aims to raise $100 million for an oil hedge fund called Logista Capital.
Bloomberg – The global hedge fund industry may shrink by 11 percent this year as funds liquidate and investor withdrawals persist, a Deutsche Bank AG survey said.
Industry assets may fall to $1.33 trillion by December, according to 68 percent of the 1,000 investors surveyed by Germany’s largest bank last month. The respondents, which hold a combined $1.1 trillion of hedge-fund assets, on average expect outflows from the industry to accelerate to $168 billion this year, 8 percent faster than last year.
The deepest financial crisis since the 1930s led to the worst average hedge-fund performance in history last year, prompting funds managed by Citadel Investment Group LLC and D.E. Shaw & Co. LP. to limit withdrawals to stem record outflows.
“If 2008 was a story about performance of hedge funds, 2009 is very much going to be a story about restructuring,” said Sean Capstick, Deutsche Bank’s London-based global head of capital introduction. “Our survey indicates redemptions will continue as a phenomenon for the foreseeable future.”
In a March 13 note to investors, Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. analyst Brad Hintz forecast hedge-fund assets to fall 18 percent this year, dropping below $1 trillion before a recovery in 2013.
The HFRI Fund Weighted Composite Index retreated 18 percent in 2008, its steepest annual decline. Still, that was less than half the 42 percent slump of the MSCI World Index.
Fortune Magazine - Is the current downturn merely a severe slump, or are we facing a second coming of the Great Depression? That’s the question everyone is asking these days. But Ray Dalio, founder of Bridgewater Associates and manager of what is now the world’s biggest hedge fund, has been preparing to answer it for eight years.
In 2001 he had his investment team build a "depression gauge" into the firm’s computer system, line by line in the code, to adjust the portfolio’s strategy and risk profile if the economy ever entered a massive deleveraging period – the kind of multiyear process that ricocheted through the world economy in the 1930s and that has eviscerated markets periodically through the ages.
Times Online – Shares in the London Stock Exchange dropped nearly 10 per cent or 50½p to a four-year low of 463½p amid fears that its trading update tomorrow will show another dramatic slump in the value of equities traded as struggling hedge funds withdraw cash.
Dame Clara Furse, the outgoing chief executive, has seen a 77 per cent fall in the share price of Europe’s biggest stock market from its £19.77 peak a year ago as it has been bedevilled by falling equity volumes and mounting competition from electronic platforms such as Chi-X and Bats. Direct Edge in the US, which has a deal with London’s Plus Markets, yesterday announced that it would convert to an exchange in the last quarter of this year.
Credit Suisse cut its target price to 495p and slashed earnings forecasts, saying the value of equities traded in London had fallen by about 30 per cent in the last three months of 2008 against a year ago and it expected these falls to continue.
Charleston Daily Mail – The Greenbrier has been a powerful asset to West Virginia since before the state was a state. Its corporate parent today, Florida-based CSX Corp., recently announced that it has hired Goldman Sachs to make the resort a "viable entity."
The resort lost $35 million in 2008.
It’s easy to understand why CSX would want the Greenbrier, only one of its concerns, to earn its keep.
As the Wall Street Journal noted, the railroad industry is grappling with a severe drop in freight volume, the hospitality industry is in a serious slump, and CSX has been harried by hedge funds that questioned its investments and called for a management overhaul. That dispute put five new faces on the 12-member board.
Tacoma News Tribune – It was a year of disillusionment, betrayal and excruciating pain for investors.
Wall Street got investing so wrong that the financial system needed an emergency $700 billion transfusion of taxpayer money to avoid collapse, and investors lost trillions of dollars of their life’s savings.
For the regular person with a 401(k), it didn’t help much if they obeyed the lessons of sound investing. Although investors are told that diverse mutual fund choices will help them get through a stock market downturn, the practice didn’t save them from a miserable 2008.
As the stock market plunged more than 50 percent from its October 2007 high, everything but U.S. Treasury bonds suffered drastic losses – real estate, commodities, U.S. stocks, international stocks and even hedge funds, municipal bonds and corporate bonds. As investors panicked and headed for the exits, strong and weak investments were sold. Virtually nothing was immune.
“All 10 sectors within the Standard & Poor’s 500 fell, from a 22 percent slump for consumer staples to a 74 percent thrashing for the financials,” said Standard & Poor’s chief investment strategist Sam Stovall.
The Australian – US stocks fell as another drop in oil prices and a warning from Toyota Motor underscored the unsparing nature of the slowdown.
Toyota forecast an operating loss for the current year, the first in the car maker’s history. The Japanese giant was thought to have developed a watertight strategy that would yield profits through thick and thin, making it the subject of managerial guides like the 2004 book The Toyota Way.
But the spreading recession caught up on Toyota, too, and it blamed a slump in the global automobile market and a sharp appreciation in the Japanese yen against major currencies for a likely loss. American depositary shares of Toyota fell $US3.50, or 5.45 per cent, to $US60.88.
General Motors was by far the weakest stock on the Dow Jones Industrial Average, falling US97 cents, or 22 per cent, to 3.52. Analysts warned that the Government rescue measure may not be enough to keep the car and truck maker out of bankruptcy court.
