Browsing: Event-Driven Hedge Funds

By Nicolas Rabener, @FactorResearch INTRODUCTION Working in the restructuring team of a corporate finance boutique is like being a trader focused on short-selling. Most money is made when companies falter, and stocks turn bearish. A restructurer’s cyclical counterpart is the ever-optimistic merger & acquisition (M&A) banker that thrives when theRead More

By Aaron Filbeck, CAIA, CFA, CIPM, Associate Director, Content Development at CAIA Association During CAIA Association’s most recent Virtual Chapter event, Keith and I (virtually) sat down with Chris Tidmore, CFA, CPA at The Vanguard Group to discuss Vanguard’s recent whitepaper, “The Wrapper Matters: Comparing Liquid Alternatives to Hedge Funds”Read More

By Aaron Filbeck, CAIA, CFA, CIPM Associate Director, Content Development at CAIA Association Excerpted from the Alternative Investment Analyst Review, Volume 8, Issue 2 The Alternative Investment Analyst Review is the official publication of the CAIA Association. Access to the most current issue is an exclusive benefit of CAIA MembershipRead More

A long-running drama continues over Xerox’ desire to buy HP. Xerox upped the ante early in the new year, announcing that it has secured binding financing commitments in the amount of $24 million. The dispute, with long-time shareholder activist Carl Icahn at its center, shows that: (a) the corporate worldRead More

NMC Health, an Abu Dhabi-based firm listed on the London Stock Exchange, has suffered a sharp loss in value as a consequence of its dispute with a forensic short seller, Carson Block, the man behind Muddy Waters Research. Block has bet against the stock because he believes that it isRead More

Eurekahedge’s latest monthly report includes a special section on the key trends in European hedge funds. It tells us that the total number of European hedge funds grew in 2019, after a decline in each of the four years before (2015 – 2018). In other words, although in recent yearsRead More

A new report from Schroders looks at global convertible bonds, instruments that straddle the boundaries of debt/equity/derivatives. It tells us—in a discussion that might be of interest to the portfolio managers of relative value hedge funds—that these bonds have come back into fashion due to the higher volatility of 2019Read More

The Eurekahedge Hedge Fund Index was up 0.31% in October. However, it doesn’t measure up to the market next to the MSCI ACWI (Local), which ended October up 1.93%. Eurekahedge’s latest monthly report observes that US-China trade talks resumed, and this led to a certain tentative optimism. Since those areRead More

The phrase “books and records” hardly suggests excitement. Yet, the cliched corporate lawyers’ phrase is not without payoff, either. Activist hedge funds are always interested in ammunition that will help them shake up entrenched managements and unlock value. The question often arises during the resultant fights: when does an activist/dissidentRead More

Machine learning as a way of managing a portfolio is a “wave of the future” with a lot of sea to cover before it breaks on the shore. Meson Capital Partners has sent its investors an update and summary for 2019 Q3 regarding its managed market neutral fund, and thisRead More

Hedge funds recently are interested in taking the long position on Telenav (NASDAQ: TNAV). According to Insider Monkey, the number of hedge funds with positions in TNAV rose from eight to 13 at the end of 2018 and the beginning of 2017. Then it slid gradually back to eight overRead More

Burford Capital, a New York-based company, provides litigation finance. This is a subject of endless debate, especially among members of the plaintiffs’ bar. The old-style plaintiffs’ lawyer simply says “no, thank you” to any potential client without the financial wherewithal to bear the costs of an action, especially if theRead More

A new paper in the Journal of Economics and Business presents data on merger arb, and which factors, especially sector size and individual fund size, do or do not have an impact on the alpha available in the pursuit of this strategy. For a given time period, the total dollar amountRead More

According to the latest report from Eurekahedge, the world’s hedge funds recorded a net growth of $3.4 billion due to performance in September 2019. On the other hand, September also saw large net outflows of $6.2 billion. Assets at the end of the month were down 0.12%.  Looking at fundsRead More

Zane Swanson, an accounting professor at the University of Central Oklahoma, has been at work on a fascinating new approach to the valuation of firms and the valuation of their equity shares. This approach may be of great interest to risk arb hedge funds. Swanson is working with an establishedRead More

The Eurekahedge Hedge Fund Index was up in August, 0.17%, easily outperforming the global equity market, as measured by MSCI ACWI, which was down 2.37%. The August number brings the Eurekahedge HFI’s year-to-date result to 6.58%. Approximately 32.6% of the funds Eurekahedge tracks are in double-digits (positive) territory for theRead More

T. Boone Pickens died quietly at home in Dallas, Texas on Sept. 11, 2019. In his long career Pickens did a good deal to give the current hedge fund industry, as well as the broader asset management industry and the energy commodities markets, their character, in a life that sometimesRead More

Negative interest rate policy—that is, central bank arrangements that seek to inspire spending by punishing savings, not merely in real but in nominal terms—have spread in recent years among the developed economies, and are now in use in Japan, Switzerland, Sweden, and the Eurozone. Denmark got the ball rolling inRead More

Intralinks has put out its predictions for mergers and acquisitions activity through the remainder of this year. The Intralinks Deal Flow Predictor tracks early-stage deal activity to predict how many deals have reached public-announcement stage six months on. The latest issue of the SS&C Intralinks Deal Flow Predictor also includesRead More

A recent study by two scholars at the University of California Irvine asks how quickly investors learn about the skills of their asset managers, including their hedge fund managers. Christopher Schwarz and Zheng Sun, both associate professors of finance at The Paul Merage School of Business at UC Irvine, hadRead More

David Stevenson, a US District Court Judge for the Northern District of Texas, has presented his analysis of the  differences between the law in the United Kingdom and the United States concerning “a debtor’s ability to approve a restructuring arrangement over the objection of creditors that disapprove.” This is moreRead More

Global hedge fund assets under management have stayed close to flat for months now. That’s one of the points made in the latest Eurekahedge report. As of July, the AUM is just a little under $2.3 trillion, or roughly where it has been since late last year. Although there haveRead More

Milind Sharma and Aravind Ganesan have developed what they call the QMIT Leveraged Buyout Model—a trading strategy—based on anticipating announcements of LBOs based on QMIT’s factor library. Sharma is the CEO of QMIT, QuantZ Machine Intelligence Technologies. QMIT is itself a spin-off from QuantZ Capital, which is a stat arbRead More

In contemporary bankruptcy proceedings, creditors’ recovery often depends on the success of clawback lawsuits initiated by trustees. Sometimes the creditors in question are hedge funds, having bought the debt instruments at a discount. Their success depends on the success of the clawback proceedings: that is, on the law of avoidance.Read More

The Eurekahedge Hedge Fund Index was up in June, wrapping up a very strong first half of the year for the hedge fund industry. The monthly increase of 1.83% reverses the down month of May, which in turn was a reversal of the strength of the first four months, withRead More

One of the tools commonly used by the management of publicly owned corporations to limit the activism (or to limit what they see as the interference) of activist investors, emphatically including equity and event-driven hedge funds, is the creation and enforcement of advance notice bylaws. Such a bylaw (in aRead More

Red ink spoiled an otherwise positive 2019 for he Eurekahedge Hedge Fund Index. The decline of 0.71% leaves the year-to-date performance still well up, at +4.32%. Approximately 41.6% of the funds Eurekahedge tracks were in the black for the month. And 15% have generated double-digit gains year-to-date. North America-mandated hedgeRead More

A new paper in the Journal of Applied Corporate Finance looks at “agency capitalism” and its development in the United States during the past 15 to 20 years. The term “agency capitalism” refers in general to any system in which institutional investors dominate as shareholders of record for the votingRead More

The Eurekahedge Hedge Fund Index continues to reflect strong performance for the year. First quarter 2019 was one of the strongest quarterly returns since the global financial crisis, and each of its three months was positive. April was another up month, +1.06%, which brings us to +5.15% YTD. Hedge fundsRead More

A new study by Jun Duanmu and three colleagues examines hedge fund use of matters of corporate social responsibility. The authors work from an asset-weighted composite measure of CSR by fund, in order to seek the difference in financial performance of those hedge funds with high CSR investment and thoseRead More

Renewable energy, however defined, is widely seen as a sustainable and socially responsible (and, if the investing is done right, very profitable) addition to one’s portfolio. Indeed, such entities as the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, an Ohio based research-and-analysis shop, exist to show that renewables are theRead More

Intralinks, the provider of inter-enterprise collaboration products that is perhaps best known for its Deal Flow Predictor, recently interviewed Paul Aversano, a managing director at the consultancy Alvarez & Marsal. Aversano leads A&M’s private equity services practice, and he is the global practice leader of the transaction advisory group. HeRead More

By Nicolas Rabener of FactorResearch (@FactorResearch) INTRODUCTION As Amazon has been decimating large parts of the retail industry over the last two decades, ETFs have done the equivalent to the mutual fund industry in the financial world. Today ETFs are covering nearly all areas of the markets, no matter howRead More

March was a good month and the first quarter of 2019 was promising, according to the April report from Eurekahedge. The Eureka Hedge Fund Index gained 1.06% in March. This yields a first quarter return of 4.36%. As the report says, this is the strongest quarterly return since the globalRead More

Three scholars affiliated with JP Morgan Chase have written a paper on hedge fund behavior ahead of meetings of the Swiss National Bank, with the idea of shedding light on the consequences of the timing of central bank announcements more generally. They conclude that the SNB contributed to the volatilityRead More

Martin McCubbin, a senior research analyst at Fidante, looks at the hedge fund performance numbers for 2018 in a new paper, which shows it was a difficult year. Early going in 2019 has been somewhat better, but that the “better” cannot be relied upon. The rest of this year couldRead More

Henry T.C. Hu, of the University of Texas at Austin, School of Law, has written an article on the “information asymmetries” that are associated with corporations that are in financial distress, but not under bankruptcy court protection. It is an article that sends us back to the Christmas selling seasonRead More

During the Vietnam War era, the metaphor of “light at the end of a tunnel” expressed American optimism under stress, The image was supposed to convey the idea that the US and its local allies could eventually attain a favorable peace in that country if only they persevered—that the lightRead More

A recent study of public employee retirement systems in the United States reaches conclusions, that, after a fair amount of “grey tsunami” alarmism in recent years, sound reassuring. The study, based on a recent survey of system managements conducted by the National Conference of Public Employee Retirement Systems (NCPERS) inRead More

Risk-on sentiment returned in January, with good news on trade talks and with the Federal Reserve in the United States putting some distance between itself and its 2018 hard-money stance (the Fed started saying in January that it would be “patient” about selling off-balance sheet assets). Globally, hedge funds grewRead More

The latest Intralinks Deal Flow Predictor says that the current M&A upcycle, which this report describes as having begun in 2014, is about to peak. There will still be some short-term upward movement, especially given the existence of a lot of private equity fund “dry powder,” from recent successful fundraising.Read More

Activist hedge funds can always be expected to trade both in lit exchanges and in dark pools, in the course of accumulating the equity stake that in turn will give them sway at an annual meeting or inside the boardroom. That is one inference from a model developed for theRead More

Those who pursue alpha through the highways and byways of mergers are surely paying close attention to the AT&T/Time Warner litigation, which may end by considerably reducing the regulatory risk that firms making a “vertical” purchase in the digital/communications world will hereafter face. This is one of the points raisedRead More

Five stories stand out as the dominant stories for and about pursuers of alpha in the year just passed. There is nothing arbitrary about the list below. We admit, though, that the order in which we present them is arbitrary: that is, it is not a ranking, and it isRead More

European hedge fund managers continue to suffer from the uncertainties of the United Kingdom’s impending exit from the EU. The latest report from Eurekahedge says that European hedge funds have posted losses in eight of the first eleven months of 2018. They haven’t been in the positive numbers since July,Read More

Huimin Chen, and Thomas Shohfi, both of the Lally School of Management, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, have written a fascinating article on the relationship of sell-side analysis and hedge fund activism. Chen and Shohfi shed some light on the old question: where do hedge funds get their trading/investing ideas? They believeRead More

Distressed debt markets have four themes emerging, according to a new paper issued by the Wells Fargo Investment Institute They are: the consequences of central bank tightenings around the globe; the elevation of debt levels, also something happening globally; the regulatory pressure over non-conforming loans (especially in Europe); and theRead More

A new paper in the Journal of Business, Entrepreneurship, and the Law looks at the “Brokaw bill” of 2016 and at the facts said to have motivated it. This turns out to be an object lesson in how scary hedge funds, especially activist hedge funds, look to legislators, and theRead More

The newest Eurekahedge report says that hedge funds globally are experiencing their worst year since 2008. They are down -2.15% for 2018 to date and in the first 10 months of 2008 they were down a full 9.55%. Other Year-to-Date Numbers Only a minority (roughly 47%) of hedge fund managersRead More

A memorandum prepared by law firm Wachtell Lipton looks at what it calls the “rise of the net short debt activist.” Wachtell Lipton earned its wings on Wall Street as a defender of established managements when those managements find themselves facing activism or takeover. Indeed, one of the founding partners,Read More