Category Archives: hedge funds

Eddie Lampert is one of the most legendary activist investors of all time: just thinking about what he did at Auto Zone makes some investors’ hearts flutter to this day. But nowadays he’s less of an activist investor and more … Continue reading →

Tim Price isn’t impressed with the way that fund-of-funds managers navigated the volatility of the past 12 months: Hedge funds, often erroneously referred to as an asset class (talent class might be more appropriate, only the phrase smacks of leaden … Continue reading →

Megan Barnett reckons that all hedge funds are high-risk investments. Because of their performance fees, she says, they’re incentivized to take greater risks because it’s there that the big money lies. I like these arguments from incentives, because they do … Continue reading →

Insight from Baruch: The strategists at my beloved employer told the punters, correctly, that this year would see a lot of volatility in equities. So, they said, increase allocation to equity long short, which struck me as precisely the wrong … Continue reading →

Every so often over the past few months, as yet another hedge fund or private-equity legend came unstuck, I wondered how Sebastian Mallaby’s book was doing. After writing an astonishingly upbeat article on hedge funds for Foreign Affairs, he decided … Continue reading →

There’s more than a little schadenfreude doing the rounds at the news that one of Jim Simons’s funds is down 12% from its peak last May – especially since it’s meant to provide "lower, yet steadier, returns" than your average … Continue reading →

According to a study by Stanford psychologist Brian Knutson, When young men were shown erotic pictures, they were more likely to make a larger financial gamble than if they were shown a picture of something scary, such as a snake, … Continue reading →

Andrew Clavell gets to the point on the subject of hedge-fund managers: I don’t begrudge the General Partners their loot one iota. What the academics fail to understand (choose to ignore?) is that the General Partners’ business model is "to … Continue reading →

Bloomberg reports: JWM Partners LLC, the investment firm run by ex-Long-Term Capital Management LP chief John Meriwether, lost 24 percent in its $1 billion fixed-income hedge fund this year through March 14, according to two people with knowledge of the … Continue reading →

Sam Jones has Lahde Capital’s month-by-month performance results for 2007. The flagship real-estate fund, which has already been wound up, returned 870% over the course of the year, which implies that it went up in value by more than 77% … Continue reading →

Remember Long Term Capital Management? The problem there wasn’t that it was investing in risky securities, like Russian bonds. Instead, Russia’s default set off a more generalized spread widening and flight to liquidity, which hit super-safe assets like off-the-run US … Continue reading →

The WSJ reports on Alan Howard: His firm is blossoming, soaring from $12.5 billion at the beginning of 2007 to become one of the largest hedge funds in the world. The article is illustrated with a hedcut of George Soros, … Continue reading →

Last week, I wondered whether Sam Heyman had lost $1 billion on a merger-arb strategy. And now Dana Cimilluca has found a couple of other companies where merger arbs are likely to have lost a huge amount of money, at … Continue reading →