Street.Com – Private equity firms continue to stage landings on the hedge fund beachhead. Following the lead of Texas Pacific and more recently Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, theBlackstone Group announced the creation of a new hedge fund that will focus on long/short equity. It’s the firm’s second hedge foray; a distressed investing vehicle launched in December 2004currently runs $600 million. Blackstone is already one of the largest funds-of-hedge-funds managers, with about $12 billion under management. Its single-manager effort is still relatively new.
Blackstone hired Manish Mittal, a managing director at $10 billion hedge fund Perry Capital, to lead the new venture. Prior to Perry, Mittal worked at two other major hedge funds: Kingdon Capital Management and SAC Capital Advisors. He started his career as a private equity analyst at Goldman Sachs (GS:NYSE – news – research – Cramer’s Take).
