Newsreel: Freaky Friday (hedge fund edition), single retirees, and performance fees=performance freeze?
Jul 24th, 2008 | Filed under: AAA Newsreels
Do PE firms make bad owners? Not according to a new survey: According to Investment News, E&Y finds that “Businesses sold by private equity firms last year saw greater growth in value and profit than their publicly held peers.” (related posting: New research on private equity surprises even some of the experts)
Like the movie Freaky Friday, hedge funds and banks have switched bodies. John Snow says Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are really hedge funds (Bloomberg) and hedge funds are side-stepping tightwad banks and lending money to each other (Financial News). Stay tuned for more zany antics!
Online dating sites aren’t helping the elderly hook-up in Austria. But that’s a good thing for pensions who are saving a bundle by not having to support a pensioner’s spouse (IPE)
Despite often issuing enough information to satisfy a Ph.D. in statistics, hedge funds get failing grades from advisors. A new survey finds nearly 90% of advisors rate hedge fund sales efforts as “ineffective” according to Investment News.
As a follow-up to our posting on the rising cost of stock borrowing, we note that the FT ran a couple of interesting pieces last week: Rising costs of shorting hampering funds and Shorting ‘makes billions’ for groups. Those poor hedge funds. Suffering at the hands of evil pension funds.
New data from Hedge Fund Research finds first half allocations to hedge funds increased by about a quarter of what they added in the same period last year. While that sounds horrendous, it wasn’t as bad as 2003.
No worries, though. P&I reports that “Institutions stick to hedge-fund guns“. Says the newspaper: “…institutional investors weren’t the culprits…Institutional hedge fund hiring and search activity was strongly positive, totaling $19 billion…”
But wait! Financial News reports that Morningstar found net redemptions from hedge funds up to the end of May. Did things really turn around that much in June? Or could measuring the hedge fund industry be an inexact science?
P&I reports that Moody’s gave a raging endorsement to LDI, saying: “We believe the positives and negatives will tend to offset one another over the long-term, making LDI neutral to mildly positive for most issuers, depending on their unique facts and circumstances.” Okay. Not really “raging”.
Contrary to some earlier academic research, one accounting firm finds performance fees don’t lead to better performance after all.
