UBS Hedge Fund May Offer Direct Access to China Strategy (Bloomberg)
A UBS Group AG hedge fund unit is considering giving investors direct access to its China strategy, after it navigated through a raft of regulatory interventions that threw doubt on the country’s investment potential. The strategy has booked double-digit gains this year, with “very positive” returns in both July and August, said Kevin Russell, New York-based chief investment officer of the $9.6 billion UBS O’Connor unit. He declined to give precise performance numbers or say whether it’s creating a separate China fund, citing regulatory restrictions.
Former RBS Manager Launches Euro High Yield Bond Hedge Fund (Opalesque)
Steven Behr, the former head of RBS’s principal strategies team, has come out of an eight-year retirement during which he managed his own family office to launch a European high yield (HY) credit fund, a spokesperson told Opalesque. This is partly due to consistently outperforming the benchmark with average returns of about 12% p.a., before selling at the top of the market before the pandemic and returning 20% from May 2020 to year-end. Behr has more than 25 years of experience working in the finance industry. He worked at RBS (Royal Bank of Scotland) from 2001 to 2008, initially on the structuring side, then moving to credit research achieving a number One European ranking.
Afalon Scales Up Amid COO Hire (Hedge Nordic)
Stockholm (HedgeNordic) – Finnish asset manager Afalon Investment Management, which runs systematic managed futures fund NS Quant, has hired Benjamin Strabo as its Chief Operating Officer (COO). Strabo joins Afalon from Finnish advisory firm Verona International, where he served as COO for one and a half years. “Welcome to the Afalon Team, Benjamin Strabo! Ben will lead our multi-family service offering.” “Welcome to the Afalon Team, Benjamin Strabo! Ben will lead our multi-family service offering,” Markku Malkamäki, Afalon’s chairman and CIO, writes on LinkedIn. Before joining Verona International in Helsinki at the beginning of 2020, Strabo was the COO of Harmony Advisors, a leading multi-family office servicing ultra-high-net-worth families in Hong Kong, for a little more than three years.
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Goldman Sachs’ Hedge Fund and Private Equity Unit Petershill Unveils London Listing Plan (Hedge Week)
Petershill, a private equity unit of Goldman Sachs that takes minority stakes in alternative investment firms including hedge funds and private equity managers, has unveiled plans for a new publicly-traded vehicle on the London Stock Exchange. Goldman is preparing an initial public offering (IPO) for the new unit, Petershill Partners, which will provide direct minority equity investments and acceleration capital for hedge funds and private equity companies. Petershill currently holds minority stakes in 19 private equity, hedge fund and other alternative asset management firms, which together have some USD187 billion of aggregated assets under management and which were previously held in private funds managed by Goldman Sachs Asset Management (GSAM).
Hedge Fund Veteran Talks Gender Gap in New Book (Pensions&Investments)
Former hedge fund portfolio manager Dominique Mielle related her experiences from nearly 20 years as a female executive in the hedge fund industry in a new memoir, “Damsel in Distressed: My Life in the Golden Age of Hedge Funds.” Ms. Mielle joined Canyon Partners LLC, Los Angeles, as an analyst in 1998 after earning an MBA from Stanford University and was only the second woman on the hedge fund manager’s investment team at that time. She specialized in distressed investing.
