Kynikos Alumni Start Hedge Fund Betting on Declining Stocks (Bloomberg)
Two former analysts of Jim Chanos’s Kynikos Associates Ltd., which rose to fame shorting Enron Corp., started a new London-based hedge fund earlier this month to bet on falling stocks globally. The Arhammar Short Alpha Fund Ltd., which started on Oct. 10 and is backed by the second-largest Baltic bank SEB AB (SEBA), will invest in 30 to 50 stocks which are expected to underperform the market, co-managers Mike Monnelly and David Bonnier said, declining to specify the amount of capital the fund has raised.
Ex-Credit Suisse traders return to sellside with Nomura (eFinancialNews)
Carlo Ramirez and Olivier Garcia, who left Credit Suisse Group AG (NYSE:CS) in 2011 to set up a hedge fund, joined Nomura in London earlier this month, according to people close to the situation. Two former colleagues at the fund, Dilbagh Kalsi and Thierry Guilhot, have also joined. Ramirez is a former head of Asian trading for equity and equity derivatives at Credit Suisse, while Garcia previously led Asia-Pacific exotic trading at the Swiss bank, according to a Bloomberg article in 2012. They incorporated RG Investment Capital at Companies House in late 2011 and won regulatory authorisation in May 2012.
Fortress Third-Quarter Profit Rises 1.6% on Investments (Bloomberg)
Fortress Investment Group LLC (NYSE:FIG), the first publicly traded private-equity and hedge-fund manager in the U.S., said third-quarter profit rose 1.6 percent as its investments gained in value. Pretax distributable earnings, which exclude some compensation costs and other items, increased to $65 million, or 13 cents a share, from $64 million, or 12 cents, a year earlier, New York-based Fortress said today in a statement. The results missed the 15-cent per-share average profit estimate of seven analysts in a Bloomberg survey. …Both The Blackstone Group L.P. (NYSE:BX) and KKR & Co. L.P. (NYSE:KKR) reported higher third-quarter earnings this month as their holdings appreciated.
Hedge funds face automation challenge (Risk)
For an industry that has been so quick to deploy cutting-edge technology in its trading strategies, hedge funds remain crustily old-fashioned when it comes to other parts of the business. Procedures for handling and processing investor subscriptions have barely changed in decades, and are based largely on error-prone manual input. That may have to change. A host of new rules – from the US Dodd-Frank Act and European Market Infrastructure Regulation, to the US Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (Fatca) and Europe’s Alternative Investment Fund Managers Directive – increase the reporting burden on hedge funds, which will have to achieve greater automation to have any chance of complying, observers say.
Paul Singer: Obamacare rollout a ‘fiasco’ (CNBC)
Hedge fund manager and billionaire conservative Paul Singer thinks the Affordable Care Act is a disaster. “It is no surprise, given the highly ideological component of its founding impulse as well as the lack of executive experience in its inventors, that the rollout of the national electronic network just weeks ago would turn into a (possibly temporary, but more likely ongoing) fiasco,” Singer wrote in a letter to Elliott Management investors obtained by CNBC.com “(It) may just be the introduction to the surprises and frustrations that are likely to befall tens of millions of Americans in the next few years.”
