Warren Buffett places $1bn wind turbine order (BusinessGreen)
Warren Buffett‘s MidAmerican Energy Holdings has this week placed a $1bn wind turbine order with Siemens for five projects in Iowa, the biggest order the German supplier has received for onshore wind farms. Siemens announced yesterday it will provide 448 of its 2.3MW turbines with a total capacity of around 1,050MW, enough to power about 320,000 homes. Markus Tacke, chief executive of Siemens Energy’s wind power division, told news agency Bloomberg that wind turbines typically cost about $1m per megawatt of capacity, meaning the deal could be worth over $1bn.
Quant losses mount at Cantab (eFinancialNews)
The $3.4 billion managed futures strategy, which uses complex computer algorithms to capture trends in global markets, was already down 22.74% this year to November 29. The losses come at a difficult time for managed futures, which are facing their third consecutive year of negative performance. The Newedge CTA index is down 1.70% to December 13, after falling 2.87% last year and 4.45% in 2011. Unlike many of its peers, Cantab’s hedge fund posted gains in the past two years, with returns of 12.8% in 2011 and 15.3% in 2012. The fund targets 20% volatility – which can make it prone to greater swings in performance than other funds – and there are three main clusters of returns: medium-term momentum, value and short-term strategies.
GLG soft-closes market neutral hedge fund at $1bn (InvestmentWeek)
GLG has soft-closed its Market Neutral fund managed by Steve Roth after inflows took the strategy beyond $1bn (£610m) in size. The group has been preparing to soft-close the fund at $1bn for some time, and earlier this year said it expected to reach this benchmark before the year-end. The move is an effort to keep the fund more nimble by maintaining it at an optimal size. Back in 2011, the fund manager reportedly said the fund may even begin handing back capital to its existing investors in the future in order to keep it at a size which will not impact performance.
More Asia Hedge-Fund Managers Expect Higher Pay, Survey Says (Businessweek)
More Asia hedge-fund industry employees are expecting increases in bonuses this year as they delivered returns, a survey by executive recruitment firm Heidrick & Struggles International, Inc. (NASDAQ:HSII) showed. The share of respondents anticipating their bonuses to increase climbed to 48 percent in a survey carried out in September by the Chicago-based executive recruitment firm, up from 45 percent in last year’s poll. By contrast, those anticipating a decline in their bonuses shrank to 11 percent from about 25 percent last year. The survey’s findings highlight growing optimism among Asia’s hedge funds, which are heading for their strongest annual growth since 2009.
U.S. Treasury Research Office Sees Less Riskiness In Hedge Funds (Fa-Mag)
A preliminary analysis of a new trove of hedge fund data has found that the industry may not be as risky as conventionally thought, a U.S. Treasury Department official said on Monday. Richard Berner, director of the Treasury’s new Office of Financial Research, said the tentative conclusion is based on an examination of hedge funds’ leverage levels, risk modeling and the amount of hard-to-value assets, among other factors. The findings are important because the office’s research may influence policymakers’ debate on which financial institutions need to be more tightly regulated.
China’s Hedge Fund Industry Looks Set to Take a Great Leap Forward (InstitutionalInvestor)
In November 2012 hedge fund manager Fang Zheng began looking into China Metal Recycling (Holdings) after hearing rumors of questionable financial practices at the company, a Chinese scrap metal recycling outfit. Within weeks Zheng and his team of researchers at Keywise Capital Management (HK) concluded that there was substance to the talk. He began shorting the Hong Kong-listed stock between December 2012 and early January 2013 even as other investors were piling in, bidding up the share price by 26 percent, to a high of HK$10.30 ($1.33) on January 11.
