XYZ Capital decoupled investment opportunities ’08:
Sudan
Burma
Zimbabwe
… Iraq?
Babylon – run by Godvig Capital – is a real world hedge fund which invests in Iraq. Real world in the ‘they actually did it’ sense, rather than the ‘grounded in reality’ one. Finalternatives reports:
January’s hedge fund misery was especially widespread: It even effected war-torn Iraq.
Like many of its hedge fund peers, Godvig Capital’s Babylon Fund started the new year on the wrong foot, dropping 4.2%.
And here’s the fund’s portfolio manager, Björn Englund:
As Western and Mid-East financial markets were broadly trashed in January, also Babylon Fund was affected, but to a smaller extent, by the deteriorating markets conditions.
And to a larger extent, we assume, by the islamofascist insurgency issue. Which we could even assign a quanty hellenophone like “negative Osama”, or something.
For emerging market funds in general (with positive Osama) January wasn’t quite so bad. The Credit Suisse/Tremont index showed a loss of 2.67 per cent.
And for the hedge fund world in general, the index was down around 1.5 per cent – not least thanks to the pretty disastrous performance of equity markets.