Our colleague Sam Jones is leaving us to take up the glamorous role of FT hedge fund correspondent.
We’re honouring him with a competition. Rules below.
Elsewhere on Friday,
- So much for those ‘green shoots’.
- How to read US employment figures.
- Smells like deflation.
- How AIG FP brought down the world.
- Statistics and basketball for beginners.
The Children’s Investment Fund Management, the UK hedge fund manager run by Christopher Hohn, posted its fourth consecutive year of double-digit growth in 2007. Revenue rose more than 70% from £333m to £574m,
Almost.
Totemic UK hedge fund manager and activist investor par excellence, The Children’s Investment Fund Management, run by Christopher Hohn, has indeed posted its fourth consecutive year of double-digit growth:
The annual Global Custodian annual survey of prime brokers is out, offering a qualitative, as well as quantitative, assessment of the world’s foremost prime brokerage firms.
The grip of the old order - the Goldman/Morgan “duopoly”
The spat between Janet Tavakoli and Nassim Nicholas Taleb refuses to go away.
The Black Swan man has updated his notes to the copy of the GQ profile posted on his website:
Those having a hard time keeping up should read the links below,
Dealbreaker points to an Institutional Investor story on a 23-year-old financial wunderkind Merritt Graves - who is managing a $4.7m equity long-short fund while nominally attending college in California.
“Hedge fund returns up, redemptions down” says Reuters. Not, though, for everyone.
Proof that the redemptions nightmare is still not over for some funds: Thames River Capital, the multi-billion fund of funds is winding up a long/short emerging markets credit fund it operates,
From Bloomberg:
June 29 (Bloomberg) — Investors are moving in lockstep like never before, driving up stocks, commodities and emerging markets and risking a replay of last year, when they all plunged the most since World War II.
Remember the clash between Janet Tavakoli and Nassim Taleb over a profile of the Black Swan man in GQ?
Tavakoli, of Tavakoli Structured Finance, highlighted a seeming error in the GQ article, which was penned by novelist Will Self.
Elsewhere on Tuesday,
- The paradox of strategic defaults.
- Madoff: 150 years is not enough.
-Western pension funds love stocks too much.
- Inflation and you: partners in freedom.
- “Australia - I like it.
Cheers erupted in a Manhattan federal courthouse on Monday as Bernard Madoff was sentenced to 150 years in prison, the maximum possible jail term, for running a $65bn Ponzi scheme that devastated thousands of investors.
The battle among shareholders over Principle Capital Investment Trust, the specialist investment company founded by Brian Myerson, is nearing its end. In the latest twist, Pointer Investments, a subsidiary of Principle,
A fraud that was off the charts in the event yielded a sentence to match.
Just how many billions are really at stake, however, made little difference to this outcome. The top bracket for losses under federal sentencing guidelines is “more than $400m”
The FT Alphaville team receives quite a few unsolicited and often irrelevant press releases, many of which we delete with nary a second glance - while others we lampoon mercilessly.
And others, we can’t help but read - like the missive which landed in our inboxes,
Elsewhere on Monday,
- Debating the CRA, ad infinitum.
- Regulation and distrust.
- On moving averages and the end of the recession.
- Lunching with the Oracle of Omaha.
- “Economists suffer from a deep psychological disorder that I call ‘physics envy’.”
His victims have called him a “monster” and want him jailed for life. On Monday, Bernard Madoff, architect of the world’s biggest financial fraud, a $65bn “Ponzi” scheme that ruined thousands of investors,
Elsewhere on Friday,
- The shorts are coming back.
- History lesson: The dubious birth of MBS.
- Regulating derivatives.
- The worst CEOs - ever.
- Bursting the bubble of bearishness.
- Behind the demand for US Treasuries.
Elsewhere on Thursday,
- Citi’s pay-rises - good or bad?
- At the ECB, forget the helicopter drops.
- Conclusive evidence that the US stock market is highly inefficient.
- Hedge-fund guy points to ‘Z’-shaped recovery.
Hedge fund lenders to Delphi, the car parts maker with close links to General Motors, are seeking to disrupt the two bankrupt companies’ restructuring plans by objecting to an allegedly secretive deal under which Delphi plans to sell its assets to GM and California-based Platinum Equity.
Hedge fund managers are turning to Twitter in an attempt to steal a march on their rivals, or so The Daily Telegraph tells us on Wednesday.
That’s very interesting, because several hedge fund managers we spoke to dismissed the idea variously as “all twatter”
Comment, analysis and other offerings from Wednesday’s FT,
Martin Wolf : Reforming regulation
Bubbles and crises cannot be eliminated from capitalism. Yet it is hard to believe the risks run by institutions had nothing to do with incentives.
Breaking pre-market news on Wednesday,
- Polar capital sees assets under management fall 52% to $1.5bn - statement.
- Development Securities announces £100m share offer - statement.
- Corporate:
Bernard Madoff should get 12 years in prison, his attorney said on Tuesday, arguing that the sentence would be sufficient punishment for the former broker at the heart of one of history’s biggest frauds.
Anglo’s response has been typically grumpy - and it’s not clear that Xstrata can pay enough to win it over.
If overlapping businesses were combined, logistics shared and Anglo’s bloated head office subsumed into Xstrata’s mergers and acquisitions boutique,
Nice to see some fighting spirit out there in fund management land…
The speech here by hedge fund manager Paul Tudor Jones on “the fear of failure”, given to a class of ninth-grade students at Buckley School earlier this month,
Elsewhere on Monday,
- Don’t believe that hyperinflation hype.
- Musings on FIASCO - and the customer as chump.
- On the uselessness of LIBOR.
- Michael Milken says “do no harm” — and he ought to know.
Top hedge funds have been buying up Lehman Brothers’ debt in hopes that the failed investment bank’s estate can win court battles to recover billions of dollars in collateral held by competitors with whom it did business.
Investigators of Bernard Madoff’s global swindle want more time to calculate the amount of money lost and the number of investors defrauded as they seek to determine restitution, but see no need to delay his June 29 sentencing,
Elsewhere on Friday,
So much for not letting a crisis go to waste.
The Green Lantern theory of financial deregulation.
Hedge fund wives on hard times.
So who trades the Vix and VXX?
More financial innovation.
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