Investors rush to exit hedge funds after record losses
Miles Costello
div#related-article-links p a, div#related-article-links p a:visited {color:#06c;} Investors withdrew a record $152 billion (£110 billion) from the stricken hedge fund industry during the final three months of last year as the worst investment performance on record left speculators scrambling for safety.
The extraordinary level of redemptions marked the culmination of a period of unprecedented turbulence. Dozens of funds, including Tudor Investments, Citadel, Highbridge and Drake Capital, were forced to restructure, suspend redemptions or negotiate lock-in deals with investors.
The rush to redeem was fuelled by the collapse in September of Lehman Brothers, the Wall Street bank, as well as a round of multibillion-dollar banking bailouts and the Bernard Madoff scandal, which continues to reverberate. Dozens of hedge fund “feeder funds” that channelled money into Madoff Investment Securities have been frozen in the wake of the alleged fraud.
Ken Heinz, president of Hedge Fund Research (HFR), based in Chicago, said: “It is almost understating it to say that there were record outflows from the industry. We’ve never seen anything like it since we started.”
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Worldwide assets under management fell from a peak of almost $2 trillion to $1.4 trillion as at the year-end, according to HFR. Hedge funds lost 18.3 per cent of their value over the 12-month period, only the second year of losses for the industry since records began, it said. December marked a modest recovery, when funds returned 0.41 per cent.
About 900 hedge funds went into liquidation or stopped declaring their monthly returns last year, Mr Heinz said. He added that pressure on performance was likely to continue for at least the next six months.
He was speaking amid further signs that hedge funds are consolidating or battening down the hatches for another difficult year. This week GLG, a $17 billion New York-listed hedge fund, recruited the two founding partners of Pendragon Capital, a London fund manager, and revealed plans to merge Pendragon’s $400 million of assets into its group.
Magnetar Capital, a global fund that at its height managed $10 billion, said that it would be shutting one of its trading desks in London and cutting staff numbers.
Yesterday, RAB Capital, the AIM-listed hedge fund that specialises in small-caps, revealed that assets under management had plummeted from $7.2 billion to $1.9 billion and annual management and performance fees had more than halved from £125 million to £51 million.
Philip Richards, co-founder of RAB, handed over his responsibilities as chief investment officer to focus on his funds. He has held the position since RAB listed on the stock market in 2004, but he stood down from the chief executive’s job last September.
Charles Kirwan-Taylor – who joined RAB in March last year and co-founded Greyshrike Capital, a hedge fund firm, in 2006 – has taken on Mr Richards’s investment duties to allow him to focus on the poorly performing RAB Special Situations and RAB Global Mining.
Investors in Special Situations, RAB’s flagship fund, agreed last year to tie up their money for a further three years in return for lower fees.