Category Archives: hedge funds

Hedge Funds: It Is Who You Know, After All

Former CNBC anchor Ron
Insana
is set to make millions of dollars not on the grounds of any
particular strategic insights, but just because
of who he knows
.
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Will the Prime Brokers Lose Money on the Bear Stearns Funds?

There’s a very scary tidbit hidden at the bottom of the NYT
coverage
of the Bear Stearns mortgage mess today:
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Bear Funds Being Liquidated: Who Wants to Buy?

It will take a brave and aggressive investor to enter this market today. On the other hand, there are lots of brave and aggressive investors out there.
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Bear’s Benighted Bearish Bear-Market Bet

How did Bear Stearns lose money betting that a falling market would drop?
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Closing Private-Equity Tax Loopholes

There’s really no reason why hedge fund managers and private-equity billionaires deserve the kind of tax treatment that they’re basking in at the moment.
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John Paulson Continues His Quixotic Fight Against Bear Stearns

The Bear
Stearns vs John Paulson saga
shows no sign of going away any time soon
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Can Bondholders Make a Profit When a Company Defaults?

Trying to explain record-tight bond spreads.
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Dsquared on Political Event Swaps

Commenter dsquared has made a couple of good points in response
to my post about political
event swaps
.
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It’s Time for Political Event Swaps

A way of hedging political-event risk.
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It’s a Bad Idea to Ape Hedge Fund Investments

If Dinakar Singh is long, that doesn’t mean you should be.
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Do Hedge Fund Returns Fall as Their Assets Rise?

The total amount of money invested in hedge funds is still dwarfed by the amount of money in mutual funds and other long-only investment portfolios. The time may come when hedge funds run out of things to invest in, but I don’t see it happening for a while.
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No Reason to Worry About Decreasing Alternative Investment Returns

Hedge funds are essentially leaving a bottle of hot sauce on the table, rather than making all their meals equally spicy for everyone.
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Lampert’s Options at Citigroup

What is Eddie Lampert intending to do with his $800 million
(or 0.3%) stake
in Citigroup
?
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Investment Professionals Stumped by “Portable Alpha”

A survey of
investment professionals
at the 2006 National Strategic Investment Dialogue
came up with some depressing results: only 60% of them could define what "leverage"
is, and less than half could define "portable alpha".
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Event Risk and Fat Tails in Hedge Funds

All
About Alpha
has made noble attempt to paint hedge funds as not particularly
risky, and "fat tails" as not particularly worrisome. But it misses
the main point, I think.
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No Hedge Fund Regulation from the EU

German finance minister Peer Steinbruck is quoted as saying that “the regulatory approach is the wrong one”.
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Taxing the Tax-Exempt

It doesn’t make any sense to single out “debt-financed investing” for taxation in these days of extreme financial sophistication and embedded leverage.
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Costas Implodes

John Costas thought he could run a hedge fund. He was wrong.
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Hedge Fund Leverage Falling

The UK’s FSA says that hedge-fund leverage is falling. But its survey doesn’t — can’t — tell the whole story.
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Hedge Fund Managers Aren’t Hated For Their Money

Any complaints from hedge-fund managers about the politics of envy risk turning into self-fulfilling prophecies. There’s no sign of such rhetoric thus far.
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Hedge Funds: Just Misunderstood?

Meme of the day is whether all the current calls for hedge-fund regulation
come not because these funds pose some enormous systemic risk, but rather because
they’re simply not understood.
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“For a $10m Loan, it’s not Worth Sending Someone to a Meeting”

$10 million is chump change for hedge funds these days.
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Hedge Funds to Help Prevent a Market Implosion

Distressed-asset funds reduce market volatility, and
act as an all-important source of bids when most investors want to sell. Hedge
funds aren’t always a source of risk and volatility
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Congress Eyes Hedge-Fund Tax Loophole

While US savers are generally allowed to save no more than $20,000 tax-free per year, hedge-fund managers can keep tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in income without paying any tax on it for years.
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Tom Wolfe and the New Vulgarians

Sometimes, the war between the old millionaires and the new billionaires is one of those fights you really want both sides to lose. But then you realize that if it didn’t exist, Tom Wolfe couldn’t write about it. And that really would be a shame.
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