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.
Seeking Alpha – This is the Third Quarter 2008 edition of our ongoing hedge fund tracking series. We’ve already covered Whitney Tilson’s T2 Partners, Peter Thiel’s Clarium Capital, Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square, and Stephen Mandel’s Lone Pine Capital. Next up, we have Maverick Capital. Lee Ainslie started Maverick Capital back in 1993 with $38 million. Nowadays, the fund is worth $10 billion. Ainslie, like many of the other fund managers we’ve profiled, has a background rooted in learning from legendary great Julian Robertson at Tiger Management.
These protégés (nicknamed ‘Tiger Cubs’) learned from the best and have had great success running their own funds. Some contacts over at Maverick have explained that its strategy is straight up stock picking, both long and short. The company made it clear though, that the company does not employ pairs trades, although, some of its long/short setups might be in the same sector.
Reuters HK – Triple A Partners, an alternative fund firm specialising in seeding new managers, said on Tuesday it would invest an initial $20 million in a new hedge fund launched by Hong Kong’s Enhanced Investment Products Ltd.
Triple A, also known as Asia Alternative Asset Partners, said it had bought a minority equity interest in EIP as well and signed a deal to distribute their existing and future funds globally.
EIP, which has more than $200 million of assets under management, operates using a rare marriage of passive and alternative investing, creating market tracking index funds its EIP Overlay Fund can use to source stock for complex trades.
Guardian.co.uk – Hedge funds and banks are expected to bear the brunt of derivative losses estimated at $15bn (£9.4bn) linked to the collapse of Iceland’s three major banks – Landsbanki, Glitnir and Kaupthing – which failed in rapid succession last month.
The complex unwinding of trades linked to debt issued by the banks began yesterday with a settlement auction to determine the payout price on credit default swap (CDS) contracts – insurance taken out against the risk of debts going bad – for Landsbanki.
Payouts on all three banks are expected to be some of the largest ever seen in the $54.6tn CDS market – greater than those relating to Lehman Brothers, whose collapse triggered the meltdown of the global financial system.
The high settlement prices for Icelandic bank CDSs will be a blow to hedge funds, banks and other derivative traders who insured the debt.
Reuters – Several hedge funds with assets frozen at Lehman Brothers may have been hit by wrong-way bets on Volkswagen, industry executives said, possibly hurting funds on trades they cannot close.
While no money has yet been demanded by the prime brokerage unit of Lehman — which filed for bankruptcy protection in September — a fund using Lehman to short-sell VW may have to pay up next year when administrators have worked out which positions belong to whom.
"Could there be some people who are short Volkswagen and can’t close the trade? Yes, there could be some," said one hedge fund executive who declined to be named, in order to speak candidly.
New York Times Blogs – Turns out hedge funds will not have to publicly disclose their secret strategies after all, at least not any time soon.
The reprieve for the industry came late Wednesday. The Securities and Exchange Commission quietly said it would relent on an emergency order, first issued Sept. 19, that would have required hedge funds to publicly disclose vast amounts of detail on their short positions, which are the bets they make against individual stocks.
Hedge fund managers and their lobbyists in Washington immediately attacked the order, saying it amounted to making the Coca-Cola Company disclose its top-secret formula.
Many hedge funds would simply cease to operate, the argument went. Others would go to great lengths to avoid the rule, including by setting up offshore affiliates and conducting trades through complex swap agreements.
Times Online – Some called it chutzpah. Some were more charitable, describing it as an exercise in putting on a brave face. Whatever it was, Michael Spencer’s claim that it was business as usual at Icap, when that company handles trades between investment banks while those same banks are falling like ninepins, was never going to work.
And so it proved. Icap, his brokerage that has become a barometer for the health of banks, was the biggest blue-chip faller yesterday, losing 89¼p, or 24 per cent, to close at 289¼p.
“Current conditions make forecasting market activity during the balance of the year much more difficult than usual,” he said. He could only say that profits this year would be higher than last. But the financial world has changed for good. Not only have Icap clients such as Lehman Brothers gone bust, but others such as Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are now classified as retail banks and can go direct to the Fed rather than sell securities through Icap.
The FTSE 100 index fell 269.7 points, or 5.3 per cent, to end the day at 4,818.77, dragged down by financials as several European banks were nationalised. One senior trader lamented: “We’re seeing panic selling for the first time in this crisis.”
Houston Chronicle – Boone Pickens, the billionaire founder of BP Capital LLC, said 15 percent of his hedge funds’ holders have asked for the option to withdraw their money after he lost more than $1 billion in energy trades this year.
Pickens, who manages funds linked to energy commodities and equities, said his equity fund has taken a "real hit" as oil company stocks and oil prices have plummeted.
"I feel like all my fingers are mashed in the door right now," Pickens, 80, said on CNBC today. "I’m trying to get someone to open the door for me."
The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Pickens was having his worst performance in 10 years, with his funds losing about $1 billion.
"It’s more than that now," Pickens said.
Pickens said his funds require a 90-day notice to withdraw money, "so if we can recover in the fourth quarter," people might reconsider exiting.
Bloomberg – Credit-default swap dealers reduced the volume of outstanding contracts for the first time amid efforts to reduce risks in a market used to hedge against bond losses and speculate on corporate creditworthiness.
The volume of outstanding trades fell to $54.6 trillion from $62 trillion in the first half, the International Swaps and Derivatives Association said in a statement yesterday. It was the first decline since ISDA started surveying traders in 2001.
“This decrease primarily reflects the industry’s efforts to reduce risk by tearing up economically offsetting transactions and demonstrates the industry’s ongoing commitment to reduce risk and enhance operational efficiency,” ISDA Chief Executive Officer Robert Pickel said in the statement. “We expect to see more effects of this over time.”
CNNMoney.com – Hedge funds were leaving the prime brokerage business of Lehman Bros. (LEH) long before Lehman filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy Sunday, and now, business there has all but stopped, according to sources.
But in certain areas, like the statistical arbitrage and repurchase, or repo markets, Lehman was and still is a top player. What happens to the prime brokerage is a complicated question, because most of that business is located in the U.K. While Lehman included its prime brokerage as part of its bankruptcy, it is not thought to be subject to the laws of Chapter 11 since the business is in the U.K.
Lehman’s prime brokerage, which like others lends money and securities to hedge funds as well as provides administrative services from back-office help to processing trades, was a key revenue-earner for the bank as recently as earlier this year. In its first-quarter earnings report in March, Lehman had reported a 38% year-over-year revenue increase in its securities service unit, which includes prime brokerage. At that time, it said it had $194 billion in hedge fund balances.
But as the investment bank started stumbling more and more the past few months – along with the rest of the financial services industry – Lehman started losing all or part of the business of hedge fund customers afraid of the counterparty risk attached with dealing with Lehman.
Seattle Times – Five years ago, the mutual- fund world was rocked by the biggest scandal in its 80-year history.
Fund companies gave some customers trading privileges that weren’t open to everyone; those special interests — notably some hedge funds — engaged in rapid trading that netted quick profits at the expense of the average shareholder.
Headlines called it a "market-timing scandal," a misnomer since there’s nothing illegal about trying to time the market. The problem wasn’t even so much the quick-fire trades as it was the special privileges that let traders play games that the ordinary shareholder couldn’t engage in and actually paid for.
Now shareholders in scandal-tainted funds are starting to receive payments to compensate for their losses. The SEC just sent checks worth a total of $40 million to 600,000 Putnam investors. Another $18 million was distributed to some 325,000 Janus shareholders.
Reuters- Hedge fund firm GSA Capital plans to raise a further $200-$300 million for its new Alpha Capture fund, which aims to use top stock ideas from investment banks for its trades, the company told Reuters. Alpha Capture, which was launched as a hedge fund on July 1, has $700 million in assets due in part to investments by two GSA multi-strategy funds. It will open for external investment on Oct 1 and is likely to be closed at $1 billion, it said recently.
Alpha Capture is a market neutral portfolio that aims to take the best stock ideas from investment banks by analysing their track record of recommendations.
RightSide Advisors- Nimbleness and creativity are qualities rarely ascribed either to America’s financial regulators or to Congress. Perhaps that is one reason why both groups continue to fumble over how to deal with hedge funds, which typically exhibit both in abundance. These lightly regulated pools of private capital employ an array of complex trades, frequently shifting strategies and, in theory, generating above-average returns.
The argument for more regulation is twofold. First, nowadays it is not only a few aficionados of the investment world who are exposed to them but a growing number of people—either directly, if they are rich enough, or through their pension funds. Secondly, some hedge funds are so large that a big one’s failure could threaten the financial system.
