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.
Winton Capital Management Ltd., the U.K. hedge fund with $12 billion in assets, will start a new fund in Japan and hire staff in Hong Kong as it expands when rivals such as Citadel Investment Group LLC retreat from Asia.
The London-based firm is going to advise a new fund sold to Japanese retail investors through Mitsubishi UFJ Securities Co. that will track the performance of its flagship commodity trading adviser fund as it seeks a slice of the nation’s $15 trillion in personal savings.
Bloomberg – Hedge funds had net inflows of $4 billion in June as the index measuring their performance remained little changed after posting its longest stretch of monthly gains since July 2007, according to Eurekahedge Pte.
The industry had net inflows for the second consecutive month, bringing total assets under management to $1.33 trillion, according to a preliminary report by the Singapore-based research firm, based on the 35 percent of funds that reported June performances. The Eurekahedge Hedge Fund Index, tracking more than 2,000 funds, lost 0.02 percent, taking its year-to- date advance to 9.4 percent, the report showed.
CNN Money – Money managers must offer new portfolios and keep cutting costs to survive in an era where frightened investors prefer safer fixed-income funds to stock and hedge funds, a report released Monday showed.
Badly bruised by last year’s financial crisis when tumbling markets and investor redemptions shrank global assets 18 percent to $48.6 trillion, asset managers face more tough times in 2009 and the years ahead, The Boston Consulting Group wrote in its seventh annual asset management industry survey.
Profits will shrivel again, likely falling to 30 percent or less this year from 34 percent at the end of 2008 and 38 percent at the end of 2007, the consultants forecast.
West palm Beach (HedgeCo.Net) – Leading risk analytics provider Measurisk, LLC, an affiliate of J.P. Morgan Worldwide Securities Services (WSS), today announced that it has crossed an important industry milestone in modeling the full positions of over 1,000 hedge funds – making it the largest position-based hedge fund analytical platform in the industry.
Measurisk acts as an independent intermediary facilitating the flow of risk information between hedge funds and investors. Measurisk receives the full positions from the hedge funds, but only provides summary risk and exposure statistics to investors. In this way, investors receive the risk transparency they need, while hedge fund managers maintain the confidentiality of their individual positions.
Measurisk also announced that the platform now includes managers that collectively make up more than 50% of the total $1.3 trillion* hedge fund industry assets.
“We are excited that the industry has chosen Measurisk as the preferred outlet to bridge the needs of both the investor and the manager" said Andrew Lapkin, President of Measurisk. "In today’s markets, transparency and risk management are paramount. Position-based risk information provides investors with a higher level of information necessary to make the best investment decisions – especially when having to navigate these difficult market environments.”
Measurisk’s independent, third party risk solutions are designed to address the needs of pension plans, endowments and foundations, family offices, insurance companies, hedge funds and funds of hedge funds. Measurisk compliments the full breadth of J.P. Morgan WSS services including: fund administration; custody; performance analytics and securities lending.
JPMorgan Chase & Co., is a leading global financial services firm with assets of $2.1 trillion and operations in more than 60 countries. The firm is a leader in investment banking, financial services for consumers, small business and commercial banking, financial transaction processing, asset management, and private equity. A component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, JPMorgan Chase & Co. serves millions of consumers in the United States and many of the world’s most prominent corporate, institutional and government clients under its J.P. Morgan, Chase, and Washington Mutual brands.
J.P. Morgan Worldwide Securities Services (WSS) is a premier securities servicing provider that helps institutional investors, alternative asset managers, broker dealers and equity issuersoptimize efficiency, mitigate risk and enhance revenue. A division of JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A. (NYSE: JPM), WSS leverages the firm’s unparalleled scale, leading technology and deep industry expertise to service investments around the world. It has $13.5 trillion in assets under custody and $3.7 trillion in assets under administration.
Stuff – Hedge funds are living up to their high-flying reputation again with strong returns in the last three months, but many investors burned by last year’s losses are clamoring for reforms before committing new money.
Final June quarter data will not be released until next week, but Merrill Lynch analysts who track returns in the $1.3 trillion industry wrote on Monday that hedge funds will likely post their best quarterly performance since early 2000.
Reuters India – Hedge funds are living up to their high-flying reputation again with strong returns in the last three months, but many investors burned by last year’s losses are clamoring for reforms before committing new money.
Final June quarter data will not be released until next week, but Merrill Lynch analysts who track returns in the $1.3 trillion industry wrote on Monday that hedge funds will likely post their best quarterly performance since early 2000.
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.
CNBC – Li Lianzhong, who heads the economic department of the Party’s policy research office, said China should use more of its $1.95 trillion in foreign exchange reserves to buy energy and natural resource assets.
Speaking at a foreign exchange and gold forum, Li also said that buying land in the United States was a better option for China than buying U.S. Treasury securities.
Reuters – A global regulatory body backed compulsory registration of hedge fund managers on Monday to restore investor confidence, saying the $1.3 trillion sector did not cause the credit crunch but may have amplified its effects.
The International Organization of Securities Commissions (IOSCO) represents regulators from over 100 countries, including the United States, Japan and the 27-nation EU.
Its final principles flesh out a statement made in March and a pledge from the G20 group of industrialized and emerging market countries in April that all hedge fund managers should be registered and directly supervised.
New York Times Blogs – The compulsory registration of hedge fund managers was backed by a global regulatory body on Monday in an effort to restore investor confidence.
The International Organization of Securities Commissions, representing regulators from more than 100 countries, said the $1.3 trillion hedge fund sector did not cause the credit crunch but may have amplified its effects.
IOSCO’s final six principles flesh out a statement made in March, and a pledge from the G20 group of industrialized and emerging market countries in April, that all hedge fund managers should be registered and directly supervised, Reuters reported. Those principles include mandatory registration of hedge fund managers while prime brokers who provide funding to hedge funds should also be subject to mandatory registration and supervision.
The European Union has also put forward a draft law that goes further than IOSCO, while the U.S. is also planning mandatory registration of hedge funds but so far in a less extensive way than the EU.
Reuters – Hedge funds are crawling back to life after a turbulent 2008 that has almost halved their assets, and fewer but stronger survivors are set to regain their leverage to chase bargains in a less competitive environment.
Hedge funds, which manage their portfolios aggressively with various advanced strategies including derivatives to gain higher returns, suffered double-digit losses last year after global stocks and commodities tumbled because of the credit crisis.
As a result of client redemptions, the amount of investor capital managed by single-manager hedge funds might have halved to close to $1 trillion by mid-2009 from the 2008 peak of $2 trillion (1.2 trillion pounds), according to the European Central Bank.
Bloomberg – Buyout firms and hedge funds, “Read my lips: You’re going to have regulation.”
So says Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, the Socialist Party president who conducted a two-year campaign for the first European Union regulations governing so-called alternative investors. Hedge funds and private-equity firms, which manage 2 trillion euros ($2.8 trillion) in the region, are in line for some of the world’s strictest rules, and potentially billions of dollars of compliance costs, under an EU measure proposed in April.
