Word: funds
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...Hedge funds as a class are still doing better than broad market indexes - or, rather, they have been performing less badly. The average hedge fund is down about 20% in 2008, according to Hedge Fund Research's HFRX global index. By contrast, the Dow has dropped 40% this year; MSCI's index of developed and emerging stock markets has plunged nearly 50%. But some large, established funds have taken big hits. In mid-October, the $17 billion Chicago-based firm Citadel Investment told investors that its flagship fund had dropped nearly 30% this year. According to Singapore-based Eurekahedge, which...
...Hedge funds restrict themselves to extremely wealthy investors who understand the risks involved and who can hypothetically absorb occasional big losses. In return, the industry has largely been exempted from the regulatory and disclosure requirements imposed on more common mutual funds. But hedge funds haven't just been the domain of the ultra-rich. Other pools of wealth, including university endowments and public pension funds, have put their money in so-called funds of hedge funds, which spread risk by investing in a portfolio of hedge funds and hence are considered safer. But since hedge funds are doing badly...
...turmoil has some questioning not just hedge-fund performance of late, but also the industry's essential business model. Hedge funds employ a dizzying array of investment strategies, from reliance upon superstar managers who preside like Delphic oracles to the use of byzantine computer algorithms that pick out minute pricing discrepancies and take advantage of them. The profits on these transactions may be small, but funds multiply them many times over by leveraging their investors' capital. This strategy can go awry - as it did spectacularly in 1998 when Long Term Capital Management, a giant U.S. fund whose founders included...
...current crisis may only be highlighting deeper flaws in the hedge-fund model. In 2006, the European Central Bank warned that too many hedge funds were investing in the same way. Because those sophisticated computer models were crunching the same data, there was a higher probability that hedgies would make the same bad bets, potentially causing a devastating cascade of failures. With so many fund managers following the herd, in other words, there was a greater chance that they would go over a cliff together. "A bank run doesn't affect just one bank," says Andrew Lo, a finance professor...
...golfers dump their memberships on an Internet site that tracks their value, sending prices plummeting. The country, he became convinced, was about to suffer a financial crisis even worse than the great conflagration that engulfed Asia in 1997, when a near bankrupt South Korea turned to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for an emergency bailout. Fearing his investment would completely evaporate, he sold the membership in October for $190,000. In 1997, says Kim, "the crisis involved only a few countries. Now it has come from the strongest country in the world. I think the crisis will last...