Globe and Mail – On March 1, about 75 European pension plan chiefs, private bankers and other institutional investors will gather in the Park Hyatt hotel in Zurich, Switzerland, to hear about a new investing opportunity: Canadian hedge funds.
In response to a swell of global interest, Scotia Capital Inc., host of the event, will also unveil a measure that tracks — to some degree — how Canadian hedge funds are performing.
The attraction? Canadian managers are experts in the white-hot world of commodities and there’s less saturation in Canada than in the wildly popular U.S. or European hedge fund markets. The market here, by contrast, has existed beneath the radar.
Until now, the Canadian industry has remained a mystery to most, with little known about the exact size of hedge fund holdings or how they’ve performed. What is known is that they’re higher risk, sometimes higher return, lightly regulated and on occasion, prone to spectacular collapses.
They’re also the fastest-growing segment of the Canadian financial market. In the past five years, assets under management in the Canadian hedge fund industry have jumped more than sixfold, according to Investor Economics.
