Every month, the financial services company State Street studies the trillions of dollars in institutional investor money it looks after as custodian and tries to gauge where things stand. Over the years, it has come up with a map consisting of five different regimes, or moods, to reflect this. They range from the bullish “Liquidity Abounds” in which investors buy equities and focus on growth, to the uber-risk averse “Riot Point”.

Guess what? Investors moved into “Riot Point” last month after flipping about for four months in the slightly less bearish but still risk averse “Safety First” regime. This essentially means that they gave up in October – which is not a particularly stunning finding given that many stock markets had their worst performance in decades.

So now comes the bad news. In the 11 years State Street has been drawing its map, the longest period of risk aversion as measured by investors being in “Riot Point” or “Safety First” was the nine months between February and October 2001. This almost exactly coincided with the then-U.S. recession.

State Street gently points out that the U.S. economy has yet to formally enter recession this time.

So star hedge fund manager Greg Coffey has opted to join established firm Moore Capital.

In April, when high-performing, high-earning Coffey resigned from GLG, the market was awash with rumours that he wanted to start up his own firm, pulling in billions from investors.

However, times have changed in the hedge fund industry.

The average fund is down nearly 20 percent so far this year, according to Hedge Fund Research’s HFRX index, while emerging markets funds have taken a particular battering as markets such as Russia and China have fallen.

Fund of funds managers say that top funds that were once able to turn investors away are now open again as investors across the industry withdraw their assets.

So perhaps for Coffey, who forfeited a bonus reportedly worth around $250 million when he resigned from GLG, a start-up has just become too risky for now.

If the shrinkage of the hedge fund industry is giving someone as well-regarded as Coffey reason to think again, then for those without a strong track record times could be very tough indeed.

Stock markets have fallen so far that they now offer brave, long-term investors a ‘once in a generation’ opportunity, according to LV Asset Management’s Tom Caddick.

While there is little sign of the bad news letting up, stock markets tend to look forward, rather than backwards, and will anticipate a recovery before it happens.

He’s backing up his brave talk by investing his own money in his funds.

However, he warns that while it could feel great in the long-term, don’t expect markets to rise immediately.

You can watch a video of Tom’s views here:

Lloyds TSB’s acquisition of HBOS will give it a supersized asset management arm with over 200 billion pounds in assets, but this new funds powerhouse will nevertheless be born somewhat inadvertently.

The combination of Lloyds’ SWIP and HBOS’s Insight will be the biggest active manager - i.e. funds that try to beat markets rather than just match them - in the UK.

Its access to Lloyds and HBOS’s huge branch network will give the funds unit a commanding position in distribution and a big slice of sales to ordinary investors.

Yet whatever the merits of the deal, it is nevertheless a deal done quickly, following the collapse in HBOS’s share price amid fears the bank was struggling to raise funds in the wholesale market.

Few in the City saw the deal coming, least of all Insight.

On its website it tells clients of its “solid foundations provided by the parentage of the HBOS Group”.

With emerging market stocks taking a beating, now would not seem to be an obvious time to launch new equity funds for the asset class. Benchmarker MSCI’s main emerging market stock index, after all, has lost more than a quarter of its value so far this year and concerns about the U.S. economic slowdown spreading are rife.

Despite this, U.S. investment manager Putnam says it is set to launch two new emerging market equity funds in October - one for U.S. investors, the other for Europeans. Is this perverse or prescient?

Putnam, of course, reckons it is the latter. During a chat with Reuters in London, Boston-based officials said the move reflected the long-term outlook for emerging markets which has not changed during the current market ructions. Growth projections for emerging economies remain far more attractive for equities than do those for developed markets, said Matthew Scales, a senior investment product manager.

His colleague, currency chief Parker King, went further. He said that despite a decade long slump in the 1990s in Japan, anyone investing there after World War II would still have made far more money than they would have in U.S. stocks. A lot of this, he said, was because of currency appreciation and that would happen in emerging economies too. “The mantra out there right now is just insane for emerging markets,” he said.