Daily News; White Plains

Germany: More Hedge Fund Transparency, Not Harsher Regulations

BERLIN (Reuters) - Germany, which currently holds the presidency of the Group of Eight, wants to increase hedge fund transparency, not tighten regulations, Deputy Economy Minister Bernd Pfaffenbach said on Wednesday [Feb. 7]. "It's not our intention to get stricter regulations but more transparency to avoid systemic problems," Mr. Pfaffenbach, the top official responsible for preparing June's meeting of G8 leaders in Germany, told foreign correspondents in Berlin.

State Street Builds Hedge Fund Operation

NEW YORK (HedgeWorld.com) - A major player in index investing and exchange-traded funds, State Street is internally developing hedge fund-type absolute return strategies as part of its growing role in active money management. The effort was started about 18 months ago. The firm now has around 12 hedge fund strategies such as volatility arbitrage, with a global orientation. The pools are managed by people who either were moved from other parts of State Street or were hired for this purpose. Th...

Sac Capital Hires Ripplewood's Berger for Private Equity Push

NEW YORK (Reuters) - SAC Capital Advisors is stepping up its private equity practice by hiring a former member of Ripplewood Holdings, sources close to the situation said. Greenwich, Conn.-based SAC, controlled by Steven A. Cohen, will aim much of its private equity focus at Japan, with investments planned for the United States and Europe as well, a source close to the firm said. SAC's move into buyout activities reflects a trend in the ballooning, $1.4 trillion hedge fund world, where funds ...

Denali, Midwest Management Start New Firm

CHICAGO (HedgeWorld.com) - Terri Engelman-Rhoads, who has spent years building all manner of hedge fund platforms from funds of funds to multi-strategy funds, has teamed up with global macro specialist Scott Ramsey of Denali Asset Management LLLP to form a new multi-strategy firm, Denali Investment Group LLC. Ms. Engelman-Rhoads will serve as president of the new Chicago- based firm, which will offer investors a multi-strategy fund investing in three Cayman-based sub-funds: a global macro pro...

Documentation Matters Column Three: The Risks of Cross Default

Documentation Matters is a weekly contributed column on trade documentation issues. This is the third in a series of weekly columns that provides guidance on the risks a fund may want to address in the course of negotiating trading documents. The primary areas of documentation risk fall loosely into three categories: (1) termination and default risk, (2) counterparty risk and (3) liquidity risk. This column will focus on issues in the first category of risk by discussing the importance of neg...

Spectrem Report: No Special Enthusiasm for New Year

CHICAGO (HedgeWorld.com) - The investment outlook traced by Spectrem Group's "affluent investor index" (based on a survey of households with $500,000 or more in investable assets) dropped two points in January, putting it at the high end of neutral territory. The index value stood at 4 in November, then rose to 12 in the final month of 2006, then fell two points in January to 10. The Spectrem scale runs from positive 30 to negative 30, while "neutral" ground runs from positive 10 to negative ...

Dow Jones: Hedge Funds See Positive Start to '07

NEW YORK (HedgeWorld.com) - Merger arbitrage funds had a good start out of the 2007 gate, according to preliminary data from the Dow Jones Strategy Benchmarks. The remaining five hedge fund strategies reviewed by the index also posted net-of-fees gains for January; and three funds outpaced their December 2006 gains, according to final figures from that month. Merger arbitrage returned 2.49% for January, improving on its 0.83% gain in December, and equity long/short took second place, posting ...

Merrill Unveils New Hedge Fund Replication Index

NEW YORK (HedgeWorld.com) - Merrill Lynch today [Feb. 7] announced the creation of the Merrill Lynch Equity Volatility Arbitrage Index, a tracking index that seeks to replicate the returns of an S&P 500 volatility arbitrage strategy employed by many actively managed hedge funds. As the hedge fund industry matures, the quest for new index products that replicate or "clone" hedge fund returns at a low cost has become a major preoccupation on Wall Street.

Technology Briefs

Financial Tradeware Partners with GlobeTax LONDON (HedgeWorld.com) - Financial Tradeware, the portfolio and fund management solutions provider, partnered with GlobeTax Data Services Inc. to provide access to a new tax information service offering, StatRate. Customers can access StatRate, a corporate actions tax information data feed, via SWIFT's SWIFTNet FileAct, an automated messaging service.