Funds Hub
Money managers under the microscope
Bears stalk hedgie jamboree
After 20 percent gains in 2009 and a year of inflows, you might expect the mood in Monaco at the annual GAIM hedge fund conference to be jubilant. Indeed, Martin de Sa’Pinto has identified some crucial developments in delegates’ late-night carousing which point to some renewed confidence.
Managers are certainly in a better mood than last year, when the industry had been through a battering from markets and disillusioned investors.
But there is still a lot of nervousness, with regulation and tax concerns very much on investors’ minds.
And a volatile May, including the industry’s biggest losses in 18 months, has taken its toll. The talk is of how not to lose money, while a session entitled “Understanding the recent strength of global macro strategies” –presumably thought up several months ago — looks like an anachronism.
Go for those nickels!
The hard lessons learnt from the credit crisis might suggest investors shouldn’t be trying to pick up the proverbial nickels on a railway track.
REUTERS/Luke MacGregor
In a blog post in May I pointed to research by Yale academic Hongjun Yan that hedge fund managers are far more likely to choice so-called nickel strategies than so-called black-swan strategies.
