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’SocGen: hedgies short euro against dollar “like never before”
A chart from SocGen’s latest Hedge Fund Watch showing that as of last week, hedge funds were short the Euro against the dollar “like never before”…
Make of it what you will — obviously their positions have fluctuated dramatically in the last couple of years (along with the exchange rate itself).
Hedge bashers
This document had previously passed this correspondent by: DP12/1 - Implementation of the Alternative Investment Fund Managers Directive. H/T Sarah Butcher.
Open that, hit control F and type “remuneration.”
Hedgies in flux
The latest annual SEI/Greenwich Associates survey of investors’ perceptions of hedge funds is out.
You find full details in the usual place, but here are the bullet points from the exec summary:
– Institutional allocations are continuing to rise,
Spot the Dog let off the leash
Who or what does the following quote refer to?
Far too much mediocrity is rewarded for nothing other than destroying value.
If you guessed the fund management industry, then you were right.
In its December investor letter,
Hedge fund survey says
That hedge fund clients get itchy feet far easier these days, and that some of them look at the credit default swap spreads of their counterparties when deciding whether to stick with them or get out of dodge.
WTI squeeze theory gains ground
What flipped WTI so quickly and severely into backwardation?
Increasingly, a consensus is forming that it was nothing more than a short squeeze. We’ve mentioned this before, but here are some more thoughts from the analyst community on Wednesday.
One Madoff superyacht for sale in Monaco
Selling off the liquidated assets of a convicted fraudster? Go to Monaco’s annual hedge fund extravaganza a.k.a the GAIM conference and hand delegates this:
(H/T Lianna Brinded.)
The calm before the (volatility) storm
We ♥ this note from Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s Ruslan Bikbov and Priya Misra.
It’s on a subject dear to our own hearts here on FT Alphaville — the curious case of persistently low volatility and the idea that it might be masking systemic risk.
An insight into the real business of ETF trading
We’ve already written about how city veteran Terry Smith of the Fundsmith Equity Fund doesn’t like ETFs and why he’s worried about the extent to which they are shorted.
But what’s really interesting
Terry Smith doesn’t like ETFs
Uh oh.
Terry Smith, City veteran, pugnacious former director of Collins Stewart and manager of the Fundsmith Equity Fund, has turned a critical eye onto one of our favourite subjects — exchange traded funds.
If we build it, they will come
FT Alphaville has explored the financing and bespoke servicing role of ETFs before.
The FT’s Gillian Tett has now openly likened the products to CDOs.
Given that, we thought we would provide some further context to the nature of such things in the commodity world.
Commodities on Monday, just a bad dream?
Was it all just a bad dream? Signs on Monday that commodities prices are at least stabilising amid positive economic news from the US, China and Europe might come as a relief markets after last week’s rout wiped a whopping $99bn off the overall market value of commodities prices,
‘A new era of Treasury price volatility’
Last week’s US Treasury sell-off; deficit despair or recovery-related optimism?
What about a not-so-secret stimulus encouraged by Fed chairman Ben Bernanke?
Former Lehman Brothers trader and now prolific Twitterer,
Risky business in correlation and volatility
Don’t short schadenfreude yet – it’s still tough at the hedgies.
From Reuters on Tuesday:
The average hedge fund inched up 0.2 percent last month [on the Hennessee Hedge Fund Index] after gaining 1.95 percent in October,
Hedge funds, Singapore and why Tokyo is hollowing out (again) [corrected]
Update: Goldman called us on Tuesday to correct a few key facts about its annual Tokyo gabfest, held last week. Our report below was based on attendance at some speaker sessions and a social gathering.
Man overboard?
Hedge fund manager Man Group was one of the best performers on the London stock market last week.
Its shares rose 15.5 per cent, against a 1.65 per cent gain for the FTSE 100:
The gains were fueled by further spurious bid speculation and the continued strong performance of AHL Diversified,
The trouble with assets, within assets, within assets
Correlation swaps. Next big thing or next big risk factor?
Theo Casey, a MoneyWeek managing editor, has looked at the fledgling asset class in more detail this week. In an article for Futures and Options Intelligence he concludes that for many investors .
A stunned short-seller never forgets
For sure the 2008 financial crisis lingers on in the minds’ of long-only investors, but perhaps it’s surprising to hear the episode scarred the shorts too. And not just because they got banned, scapegoated or squeezed.
Contrarian institutional investing, hedge fund edition
A third of institutional investors – by common consent the holy grail of hedge fund clients thanks to their willingness to ride out a little bit of vega – say they’re looking to up their allocations to hedge fund managers,
Motivational indexing
The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday how — shock, horror — Wall Street banks may have actively created and pushed securitised products to some clients which they simultaneously advised other clients to bet against.
Is ‘cash for commodity’ the biggest trade in town?
FT Alphaville has speculated before about the chances that the financial credit crunch led a number of commodity players to turn to the term-structure of their markets to access an alternative type of funding.
Key man risk all over again [updated]
You’d think Guillaume Rambourg’s exit from Gartmore would be priced in by now.
And you’d be wrong. Some early share action on Thursday:
How much key man risk is left, we wonder?
Update (8.55 GMT):
Prime custody, and the business of collateral
No, it’s not a prison for hedge funds.
Rather, it’s a model that is (re)-springing up amongst traditional prime brokers and custodians all over in the wake of the Bear Stearns and Lehman crises. It’s called prime custody and fuses the roles of custodian and prime broker together into one entity.
Hedgies are better off in Asia … or are they?
Within the big wide world of Asia-focused funds, some interesting trends emerge via recent research from Singapore-based consultancy GFIA.
As the FT reports on Tuesday, Asia-based hedge fund managers have been generating higher returns than those outside the region running similar strategies,
Will the EU limit hedge fund pay?
According to the BBC, new EU rules to regulate bank bonuses – announced on Thursday - will hit Mayfair hard: the onerous restrictions on pay, says Robert Peston, the BBC’s business editor, will apply to hedge funds too:
‘We are done with financials’
As the war on speculators, banks (indeed entire financial system) rages on, one big US hedge fund has had enough.
Writing to investors, the fund says it’s now too risky to invest in large financial institutions for anything other than the short-term.
Ahead of the curve on the VIX? (Updated)
If you invest with options, you might find yourself with a long-volatility exposure?
In which case, you might be inclined to offset that risk. One way you could do so — as we understand it — is by shorting or buying puts dynamically on the VXX ETF.
[MoneyTech] The hedge funds are watching us…
Okay, maybe not ‘us’ as in FT Alphaville, but they are watching some other financial blogs.
From Tim Human at the Cross Border Group:
Data firm monitoring influential blog sites Hedge funds are testing out a data feed produced by monitoring a group of financial commentators that includes bloggers.