Connecticut Hedge Funds

Connecticut Hedge Fund Guide

Here is a short collection of articles on the hedge fund industry in Connecticut. I am always looking for more valuable online tools and resources to add to these geographical hedge fund guides to the hedge fund industry. If you have a white paper or PowerPoint that I can include here please send me an email and I will post it for everyone’s benefit.

• Look at a map and it would seem that companies and businesses looking to move out of New York City and into nearby suburbs would naturally choose Westchester County the city’s immediate northern suburb. But when hedge fund managers began moving out of Manhattan a few decades ago, they ignored Westchester and chose instead to move their homes and businesses into Greenwich.
• Great chart comparing the global hedge fund billion dollar club by location. Greenwich is 3rd on the list.
• The Connecticut Hedge Fund Association is a great resource for hedge fund information and networking in Connecticut. Information about events, membership, and leadership are all available here.
• The industry-wide job website contains frequent job postings for those looking for employment in Connecticut.
• Bruce McGuire says he was greatly influenced by a 2004 report by Casey, Quirk & Associates of Darien, which “estimated that institutional capital in hedge funds would increase from $60 billion to $300 billion by 2008” and also “predicted that by 2008, institutional capital would account for 50 percent of annual net new flows into hedge fund.” Most people read, think, and move on. Not McGuire. He acted upon the information and founded the Connecticut Hedge Fund Association (CTHFA) in 2004.
• Gottex Fund Management has sued a Connecticut hedge fund manager, alleging that it broke promises and misled it over redemption requests. The US$16 billion Swiss fund of hedge funds manager says that Greenwich-based Stewardship Investment Advisors and its managing director, Marlon Quan, did anything but live up to the firm’s name.
• Several years ago, when Amaranth Advisors cratered after losing billions on bad natural-gas bets and Pirate Capital became the subject of an SEC investigation, other Connecticut hedge fund managers grew nervous that they would become a target for a local politician looking to steal a few moves from New York State attorney general Eliot Spitzer.
• Connecticut hedge funds debate how much to tell investors to appease the SEC.
• A Connecticut hedge fund that bet heavily on the natural gas market lost almost $6 billion over the past month as it sold assets at a loss to stay afloat while its bets on natural gas plummeted, the fund told investors. Greenwich-based Amaranth Advisors said in a letter late Wednesday that the fund lost about 55 percent of its year-to-date assets.
• Hedge-fund scandals are piling up faster than autumn leaves on suburban lawns. In late September, the founders of Bayou Management, a $400 million Connecticut hedge-fund firm, pleaded guilty in federal court to criminal fraud. Two weeks later, the Securities & Exchange Commission filed fraud charges against the founder of the Wood River hedge funds
• State and federal officials in Connecticut are investigating the possible collapse of the Bayou Group, a hedge fund and brokerage firm in Stamford that managed an estimated $400 million for its investors, according to two people briefed on the investigation.
• Though only a paragraph long, a hedge fund disclosure bill in Connecticut is making waves in the nation’s capital. At a March 7 hearing of the state legislature’s joint Banks Committee in Hartford, Robert Clark, general counsel of the Washington-based Managed Funds Association, warned that the bill is “ill conceived and detrimental to the interests of the people of Connecticut.”
• The current market-based system is the best way to regulate the trillion-dollar hedge fund industry although improvements can be made, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said Wednesday. Bernanke, speaking to a conference on global economics in New York City, said that the current system is superior to increased government regulation.
• Fugitive former hedge fund manager of a Connecticut based hedge fund, Samuel Israel III surrendered to police in Massachusetts on Wednesday, ending a federal manhunt after he faked his own death to avoid a 20-year prison sentence.
• Regulators’ interest comes from both the federal government and from the states, which are increasingly looking for ways to monitor hedge funds. One particularly important state, Connecticut, is considering two bills aimed at increasing the industry’s transparency. The Greenwich Time, based in the well-heeled community that is a favorite location for hedge funds, reported on the legislation Friday.
• Very interesting article detailing the relationship between hedge funds and divorce.
• Hedge funds would seem to be a business in which location doesn’t matter. Buy and sell orders can be executed from a beachfront villa in Costa Rica just as fast as from a cube farm in midtown, and the laws of economics dictate that businesses seek out the lowest-cost destinations.
• For more than 35 years, the modest, four-story building here known as Two Greenwich Plaza was home to a hodgepodge of small shippers, manufacturers and lawyers. Today, Two Greenwich Plaza is one of the most sought-after office buildings in one of the fastest-growing corners of the financial world.
• Considerable amounts of ink and pixels have been devoted lately to characterizing Barack Obama as the presidential candidate of the hedge-fund set. A Financial Times article last month quoted an anonymous United States businessman as saying, “The whole of Greenwich is backing Obama” — a reference to Greenwich, Conn., the leafy suburb that many hedge fund managers call home.
• No one in ritzy Greenwich, Conn., is losing sleep over RBS Greenwich Capital’s relocation to Stamford. In fact, the financial services firm’s move may be a blessing for the city, because it frees up 160,000 square feet of space in a market where vacancy in the central business district is nearly zero.
• Calgary, Alberta and Greenwich, Connecticut might be expected to mix about as well as oil and (sparkling) water. Calgary, which has boomed in recent years on the back of oil money, in its soul remains a cow town. Greenwich, a leafy suburb of New York, is anything but. The only herding done there recently is by the hedge funds that call it home following the latest investment fad.
• Interesting CNN comparison of the 25 top-earning towns. Greenwich, CT is number 14.
• Global hedge fund event taking place in Greenwich, Connecticut “the hedge fund capital of the world”
• A small hedge fund that provided short-term debt to companies has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Greenwich, Connecticut-based SageCrest Finance, managed by Windmill Management, said in its Chapter 11 petition filed in U.S. bankruptcy court that it had listed assets of $50 million to $100 million, and debt between $1 million and $10 million, reported Reuters

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