Ascend Capital Can’t Battle The Tough Market Environment - It Is Also Shutting Down
This year has been very hard on some big hedge funds, which saw no other way out except to close down.
Ascend Capital is a San Francisco based long-short equity hedge fund that was founded in 1999. The fund’s founder and Chief Investment Officer is Malcolm Fairbairn. Ascend Capital has more than $3 Billion in AUM as of May 2011. Ascend Partners II fund had a 3-year annualized return of 8.3% between 2006 and 2008, and lost only 3% in 2008. Ascend Partners II was among Barron’s Top 100 hedge funds in 2009. Ascend Partners II returned 8.6% annually between January 2004 and May 2010. Ascend Partners, Ascend’s flagship fund returned 16.2% annually between Jan 2000 and September 2007. Fairbairn previously worked at Citadel Investment Group and Strome Susskind. Malcolm Fairbairn holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and has B.S. and M.S. degrees in Chemical Engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Ascend Partners Fund II, which has $438 million in AUM (Septemebr 2014), returned 3.5% in 2014 through November, vs. gains of 11.6% in 2013, 3.5% in 2012, and a loss of 3.5% in 2011. The fund's maximum drawdown was 5.2% in 2008. Check out Ascend Capital's 2014 Q3 investor letter for more details.
