Whoops. If only they’d hung in there.
Greg Newton at Naked Shorts relays the tale of Keel Capital, a US hedge fund that once managed $175m in assets. But reports on Monday said that the fund had decided to close down because of a lack of attractive short-selling opportunities and a strategy that it described as too restrictive.
The long/short equity hedge fund focused on companies undergoing disruptive change and started trading in early 2005. They chose to liquidate because a strategy shift would have taken too much time and money, co-founder Jeff Bernstein said in an interview.
As more hedge funds have started and others have grown into giants, trading opportunities have become scarcer and volatility has declined, he said: “It has become somewhat systemic: With the growth of hedge funds, short interest is higher and that has dampened volatility and could lead to long periods of lower volatility in future,” according to Bernstein. “To compound this with a low-volatility fund was difficult.”
They are not alone. Cantillon Capital Management in January used a similar line when they decided to call it a day.