Word: stockings
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...safe place to park their wealth during times of economic turmoil. Funds flourished earlier this decade by offering higher returns than investors could get in more conventional vehicles. Because they are largely unregulated, managers are free to employ a wide variety of sophisticated strategies, including short-selling (borrowing a stock and selling it in the hope of buying it later at a lower price to return to the original lender). The objective is to achieve - for hefty fees - consistent positive returns in good and bad markets, and at reduced risk. But the crash in global equity markets has dented fund...
...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 tracks the industry, hedge funds lost...
...addition, highly leveraged funds are being forced by their bankers to come up with more collateral as the value of their holdings falls, forcing managers to sell more shares to raise more cash. It's a vicious circle: funds are rushing to sell the same illiquid securities, driving stock prices down and triggering new waves of selling. This mass deleveraging by the industry has been cited as one of the causes of recent record volatility in world markets...
...crunch, leverage is again proving to be a troublesome strategy. Borrowing has become prohibitively expensive. Plus, in markets where deep losses are inflicted on virtually all asset classes, there are fewer pricing discrepancies for hedge funds to take advantage of. Then there's the short-selling - betting on falling stock prices - that funds use to hedge against losses and theoretically make money whether equity markets rise or fall. Funds that employ long/short strategies have been hampered by government bans on short-selling intended to calm unsettled markets. Indeed, shorting strategies have been widely blamed for exacerbating volatility...
...teeter in September, South Korea's government believed that it was in a far stronger position than a decade ago. Its financial institutions seemed sturdy, with a mere $70 million of those toxic mortgage-backed securities that doomed banks in the U.S., while the central bank was well stocked with $240 billion of hard-currency reserves - more than sufficient, economists believed, to protect the economy from any external shocks. "We didn't need a special spotlight," says Yi Jong Goo, standing commissioner at the Financial Services Commission (FSC), the government agency that oversees the country's finance industry. They...