* Hedge Fund Matrix Launched

In a project which brings together some of the world's leading hedge fund and financial markets bodies, today marks the launch of the Hedge Fund Matrix--a user-friendly Web site that offers the first step towards harmonization between existing sound practice guidelines.

The Alternative Investment Management Association, the Hedge Fund Standards Board, the International Organization of Securities Commissions, the Managed Funds Association and the Asset Managers' Committee of the U.S. president's Working Group on Financial Markets have brought together their respective works on hedge fund sound practices for the benefit of the industry and other users.

Many of the core principles in existing sound practice guidelines are similar and now, using the Hedge Fund Matrix, users will be able to compare the various guidelines, side-by-side.

The Matrix includes information on: creating and managing a hedge fund management business; the investment process and portfolio risk management; portfolio administration and operationalcontrols; raising capital and investor relations; and hedge fund structure and organization.

Freely available to all, the Hedge Fund Matrix provides relevant and insightful information for hedge fund practitioners, investors and the regulatory community, and to all those servicing and providing professional advice to the hedge fund industry.

The Hedge Fund Matrix is located at www.hedgefundmatrix.com.

* Hedge funds add fuel to crisis ?

Hedge funds, the opaque and often vilified investment vehicles that aggressively maximize profits while flying under the radar, are contributing to the turmoil in the equities markets.

Plunging stock prices have wreaked havoc on hedge funds, which employ sophisticated trading strategies and can often profit from market anomalies or a company's demise. September was the second-worst month for hedge funds since the industry group Hedge Fund Research Inc. began tracking their performance in 1990.

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When hedge funds fare poorly, nervous investors withdraw their funds. Redemption requests, as the withdrawals are called, in turn force hedge funds to sell assets — stocks they hold — to raise cash to pay back investors.

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Longo, who also oversees hedge funds for an investment group, estimates that as much as 25 percent of the stock market's recent declines are due to hedge funds selling assets to meet redemption requests.

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The magnitude of hedge fund sell-off is expected to worsen. Ang said it's possible that 20 percent of the estimated $2 trillion in hedge-fund assets could be sold by the year's end.

What's more, Ang said, is once hedge funds – which are heavily leveraged — sell assets, they have to sell more assets to raise cash to reduce their debt load. "This effect might be much larger depending on what the leverages are of these funds," he said.

Investors receive reports on their hedge funds' performances each quarter typically, and usually must request redemptions three months in advance.

The likely losses will reshape the hedge-fund industry. Though the extent of the impact is a matter of debate, many experts agree that the coming months will see the collapse of many of the more than 10,000 hedge funds.

Detail: Hedge funds add fuel to crisis

* WSJ: Fund of funds

Redemptions, Drop in Value Have Some Forecasting Gloom

Summary: "You are looking through a market that has been hit with a liquidity shock impacting all strategies, and hedge funds are more concerned about operational issues, reining back risks and holding cash in anticipation of redemptions," said Phil Irvine, co-founder of recently formed institutional consultant PiRho Investment Consulting, who predicts declines this year of 10% to 15% after a "pretty awful" September and despite a possible bounce in November and December.

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Some might reason that the funds' losses don't justify the 1% management and 10% performance fee funds of funds charge on top of 2% and 20% fees for individual hedge funds. Robert Howie, principal in Mercer's investment-consulting business, said funds of hedge funds will survive but take a "diminishing slice of a growing pie" as institutional investors and other sophisticated investing institutions launched their own investment programs.

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Mr. Howie predicted that well-resourced managers will launch more funds of funds focusing on specific strategies such as distressed debt or commodities -- as opposed to more generic hedge funds -- and there will be increased competition from infrastructure and clean technology funds, although he said investors were "not rushing into new investments."


Detail: Funds of Hedge Funds are Under Pressure

* Hedge Fund Leverage

HedgeCo.net reports: The Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland was probably abuzz last week watching history unfold before its eyes. After all, one of the lynchpins of the organization’s Basel II Accord was the requirement for banks to mark-to-market all assets - including less liquid ones. And it appears that doing so in a leveraged environment has put several banks into a death spiral in recent weeks.

But the BIS is also keeping an eye on hedge fund leverage. The organization just released a working paper called “Estimating Hedge Fund Leverage” that proposes a new method of calculating the level of leverage used by hedge funds and, it is hoped, a way to measure any resulting systemic risks to the financial system. Regular readers may remember that this topic was also covered by the Fed’s Tobias Adrian last year.

Detail: http://www.bis.org/publ/work260.pdf

* High Watermark

The highest peak in value that an investment fund/account has reached. This term is often used in the context of fund manager compensation, which is performance based.

The high watermark ensures that the manager does not get paid large sums for poor performance. So if the manager loses money over a period, he or she must get the fund above the high watermark before receiving a performance bonus. For example, say after reaching its peak a fund loses $100,000 in year one, and then makes $250,000 in year two. The manager therefore not only reached the high watermark but exceeded it by $150,000 ($250,000 - $100,000), which is the amount on which the manager gets paid the bonus.

Related words: Crystallize; Equalization; Performance fees

* Side Pocket

A type of account used in hedge funds to separate illiquid assets from other more liquid investments. Once an investment enters a side pocket account, only the present participants in the hedge fund will be entitled to a share of it. Future investors will not receive a share of the proceeds in the event the asset's returns get realized.

Investors who leave the hedge fund will still receive a share of the side pocket's value when it gets realized. Usually only the most illiquid assets, such as delisted shares of a company, receive this type of treatment, because holding illiquid assets in a standard hedge fund portfolio can cause a great deal of complexity when investors liquidate their position. Overall, side pocket accounts resemble single asset private equity funds in structure.

* The benefit of lock-ups

Reuters reports: Hedge fund investors are increasingly demanding longer lock-ups for their money -- a move almost unheard of a few years ago -- as fears of big withdrawals start to outweigh the need to get out of badly-performing funds. While hedge fund performance has been poor this year -- Hedge Fund Research's HFRX Global Hedge Fund index fell 6.9 percent in September, its worst monthly performance on record, taking the year-to-date drop to 11.61 percent -- many investors are more worried about the survival of funds they invest in.

Many fear a rush for the exit door in underperforming funds could hurt those investors who are left by leaving them with less liquid assets, or could force funds to close and give long-term investors their money back at a time when asset prices are low.

In contrast, some investors feel that riding out the credit crisis over the next few years could generate attractive returns. "Some investors want lock-ups so other investors can't get out and destroy the business. We're seeing one-to-three years (lock-ups)," Roberto Cagnati, head of manager selection at Swiss-based Partners Group, told Reuters.

* Alternative Energy ABL Fund

	Alternative Energy ABL Fund Gains Momentum from Credit Crunch
posted on Monday 6 Oct 2008 07:29 BST
While many hedge funds across Wall Street are closing down from rising redemptions and poor performance, one emerging fund has found that the current market turmoil has actually increased investors’ interest in their fund. The Aurarian Capital Clean Energy Asset Based Lending Fund will launch on October 31, 2008. The fund will provide assetbased loans to finance renewable energy power plants and biofuel refineries. Asset-based lending strategies are clear winners in the current market environment due to their lack of correlation to the broader market indices, but the increased attention to the Clean Energy ABL fund can be partially attributed to the credit market collapse. Last week, the Fund signed its first binding term sheet with a biofuels developer for a $78 million investment, with the right to finance three additional plants of increasing size and profitability. The biofuels developer, like many of its peers, was unable to secure credit from traditional lenders due to the ongoing credit crunch. Following a due diligence process, Aurarian was able to step in and fill this “financing gap.” SAC veteran and founder Jason Gold leads the team ensuring proper technology and business model due diligence while co-portfolio manager Kent Larsen leads the team in deal structuring. Although he didn’t reveal all the terms of the deal, Gold indicated that the interest rate Aurarian would receive on the debt would be 20%. Coupled with the additional fees, warrants and Aurarian’s share of the tax credits, the returns would likely be “comfortably north of 20%.” Gold continued, “This deal provides us with over $1 billion of backlog that we’ll be able to fund at very attractive terms. I’m pleased that we will launch with such a profitable set of deals in our arsenal.” “And while we certainly feel badly for those whose businesses have been adversely affected by the constrained credit environment, one positive outcome of this overwhelming negative is that deal-flow for our project finance model has expanded materially. Our experience in proper structuring of these deals made us a lender of preferred resort in the alternative energy industry,” said Gold. Strong governmental and social support behind the clean-energy movement has created a model that investors seem to find compelling, but this is only the beginning. “The demand for this fund has exceeded my most optimistic estimates” said Gold. “An investor scale-back now is likely at the fund’s launch, and our new priority is to partner with the right investors who bring long term strategic significance.”

* Not the problem, but the solution

Hedge Pride - An open Letter to the Financial Times From Simon Ruddick, Managing Director of Albourne
posted on Friday 3 Oct 2008 11:12 BST
Albourne is not a hedge fund, but it helps pension plans, university foundations and charities and the like allocate money to them. We are hugely proud of this work because we are utterly convinced that hedge funds are good for our clients; good for the markets and good for the average man, and woman, in the street. For all our sakes, discussion of the role and impact of hedge funds has to be disentangled from the populist politics of envy. For the record, although it should be completely irrelevant: I have never voted Conservative; I was the first in my family to stay in school after 15 and I am hugely proud of my family’s union roots; I am writing this from our offices, which are juxtaposed between a gas-works and a home for lost dogs. I feel compelled to “stand up and be counted” at this time exactly because it will be the vulnerable in society who end up bearing the brunt of the current meltdown in commonsense, if it continues on its current path. The global credit binge was neither created, nor fuelled, by hedge funds. They are now being vilified for having played a role in bringing this madness to an end. Those investment banks running with 29 times leverage, or building societies lending out radically more money then they had received in deposits, were all fully regulated entities. Did the regulators blow the whistle: or the management or shareholders of those banks; or the journalists; or the politicians? Left unabated, just how much deeper into trouble could this inadvertent conspiracy of ignorance and negligence have got us? There needs to be quite a dark word beyond irony to describe why the FSA has initiated multiple enquiries about short-selling without having initiated a single enquiry directed at the officers of the firms that have actually failed. Even the Archbishop of Canterbury now seems happy to pontificate on short-selling, as if it were an ecumenical issue. Presumably he is also against wasps, rain, MMR jabs and a whole host of other things that appear very irritating to those who have absolutely no concept of how equilibrium within complex systems has to work. For the avoidance of doubt, not a single dollar of tax payer’s money has ever been, nor ever will be, needed to bail out a hedge fund. Indeed, there is already a pool of $700bn waiting to rescue the world’s financial markets: it is called the hedge fund industry. Quite simply, it works because of an alignment of interests. Hedge fund managers put their own money, alongside that of their clients’, exactly where their mouth is. Of course, there will always be some who just find the rich intrinsically unattractive. They should vote for higher taxation. Many may then take that wealth, their taxes, their donations and the business that their consumption creates somewhere else, but at least London’s loss would be some other city’s gain. What would convert a crisis into a tragedy would be to regress to a state-managed economy where rules will always be “gamed” and where corruption fills the vacuum left by honest aligned god-fearing endeavour. Hedge funds are not the problem. They are the solution.