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.
New York Times Blogs – Duff Capital Advisors has recently laid off dozens of its employees and is holding off on its plans to raise as much as $1.5 billion just eight months after the hedge fund firm began business, according to people briefed on the actions.
The Greenwich, Conn.-based firm was started in March by Philip N. Duff, a former chief financial officer of Morgan Stanley, with $500 million of capital from the New York private equity firm Lindsay Goldberg. At the time, Duff Capital said then that it was in discussions with several financial institutions to provide seed money for its investment strategies, beginning in the past spring.
While the firm is still in discussions with clients and some potential investors, it has failed to find any new capital so far.
New York Times Blogs – After pouring money into Barack Obama’s campaign, what can hedge funds and their executives expect from the new president?
If history is any exmaple, says FINAlternatives, they shouldn’t expect a cuddly relationship.
Mr. Obama didn’t appear sympathetic to the industry on the campaign trail, the publication noted, calling John McCain the candidate of “Joe the Hedge Fund Manager,” a riff on McCain’s pledge to serve the “Joe the Plumbers” of the U.S.
And during his time in the Senate, FINAlternatives noted, Mr. Obama sponsored a bill that would have required hedge fund managers to set up anti-money laundering programs supervised by the Treasury Department. (The Treasury abandoned a similar proposal last week).
The president-elect has also backed tax proposals that increase the burden on hedge funds and private equity shops, the publication said.
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.
New York Times Blogs – Jack Nash, a former chairman of Oppenheimer & Company who helped pioneer the modern hedge fund business, died July 30 in Manhattan. He was 79.
He died at Mount Sinai Medical Center after a long illness, according to his family.
Mr. Nash, who fled Nazi Germany with his family at the age of 12, joined Oppenheimer as a trainee in 1951 when it was still a small Wall Street investment firm. He left briefly to work for his father’s textile business, but returned to the firm in 1954.
Mr. Nash became the company’s president in 1974, and its chairman in 1979.
At Oppenheimer Mr. Nash met Leon Levy, his longtime business partner. They specialized in leveraged buyouts and transformed the company into one of the world’s largest mutual fund businesses.
New York Times Blogs- Big Brown may have failed to complete his Triple Crown sweep on Saturday — indeed, he came in dead last. But hasn’t slowed down what appears to be a burgeoning new sector: the race-horse hedge funds.
Big Brown’s owner, International Equine Acquisitions Holdings, isn’t the only player trying to raise a new horse-focused hedge fund, in which the owners adopt the much-ballyhooed two-and-twenty fee structure. The Wall Street Journal reported that Nick Zito, the trainer whose horse bested Big Brown, is also seeking to get into the game with his own fund.
