Former UBS prop trader Jon Wood tends to react with aggression when outsiders ask questions about the performance at his Monaco-based hedge fund, SRM Global. Any conversation is usually accompanied by a threat to reach for the nearest lawyer.
Which is pretty self-defeating, since the effect is to goad the media into repeating its enquiries.
And so the Wall Street Journal is the latest to detail the reportedly disastrous performance at SRM - down an eye-watering 85 per cent since inception in September 2006. Allegedly. According to the Journal. Which cited that usually reliable source, “A person familiar with the matter.”
Since the SRM Global Master Fund was the largest ever European hedge launch at the time, raising $3bn, we must assume Mr Wood’s run of bad luck stretches further than his harrowing involvement in Northern Rock.
Indeed, it stretches to Countrywide Financial, according to public disclosures, and to Bear Stearns, reportedly, into which Mr Wood followed his friend and fellow Brit financier Joe Lewis.
Still, as Greg Newton at Naked Shorts points out, investors in SRM, which include UBS, agreed to a five year lock-up - meaning Mr Wood still has three years to make the 600-odd per cent it will take to get his investors back to even.
Correction, 12.19: Messrs Lewis and Wood are not friends, according to a person familiar, etc.
Related links:
SRM hedge fund sees sharp fall - FT
Wood on his mettle - Lombard
