September's hedge fund performance numbers continue to reflect the buoyancy of the underlying market which has now seen a sustained rally of close to 13% since the low in early June. Not surprisingly September's best results came from Equity 130/30, Equity Long, and Equity Long/Short strategies, with Naos the best performer with a monthly return of 10.69% for its Emerging Companies Fund. For all performance details click here.

While on the subject of performance, a month ago we noted the four-year anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Bros, and the havoc which was to follow. For those of us old enough to remember, today marks the 25th anniversary of the October 1987 stock market crash which wiped 23% off the market's value in a single day. For a few years afterwards the market got the jitters each October for purely psychological reasons. Thankfully that phase has passed although not the tendency for investors to forget the meaning of risk after a few good years.

This week's economic data from China came in as expected, which probably surprised no one, least of all the cynics amongst us that note the almost uncanny resemblance between the Chinese government's projections and the actual numbers, particularly given the speed at which they are produced at quarter's end. However, even allowing for that healthy dose of cynicism, growth of close to 7.5% is nothing to be sneezed at. Anything less and we would undoubtably have all caught a cold.

This week we completed and released the latest AFM Review featuring one of BlackRock Australia's funds. Generally speaking Australia's best absolute return and hedge funds are dominated by boutique and home grown fund managers. As a result it is unusual to see an organisation the size of BlackRock, which globally manages US$3.65 trillion (of which $45 billion is Australian based) show up in AFM's top performing rankings. For the record the BlackRock Australian Equity Market Neutral Fund has an annualised return of 12.54% since inception in September 2001, with volatility of less than 6% and a Sharpe Ratio of 1.26. For a copy of AFM's Review, click here.

For this week's "and now for something completely different" a couple of English lads with too much time on their hands. They'll probably get (or may have got) top marks in their university exams however.

Have a good week-end.

Regards,

Chris.

September hedge fund performance is looking positive at +3.09% with 42% of single fund's performance received, taking YTD results to +7.79%. For full details and returns by sector, click here.

Meanwhile this week I spent an evening sitting in a hotel Restaurant in Melbourne reading the Bloomberg newsfeed on my iPad. It was very sad. Not just the fact that in one of the country's most vibrant cities I was reduced to spending the evening away from home, by myself, with just my iPad, but the news emphasised what a basket case Europe is, and more particularly Greece and Spain are.

Angela Merkel was due to dish out some good old Teutonic austerity medicine to the hapless, tax effective Greeks, protected by some 7,000 riot police. No wonder she only intended staying for six hours before legging it back home to face an equally unhappy home electorate. Today's news tells me that 25% of Greeks are now unemployed.In Spain the economy continues to go from bad to worse with unemployment also at horrific levels, particularly amongst the younger generation, and banks unable or afraid to foreclose on defaulting mortgagees for fear of unleashing a tsunami of property, and probably social unrest, onto the already flooded market.

Meanwhile across the Atlantic it was reported that State Street was charging (yes, charging) depositors for holding Danish Krone and Swiss Francs. And it seems those same depositors are prepared to pay for the privilege of safety.

What seemed apparent from reading these and other reports was that it looks as if there are at least five, and possibly ten hard years ahead for Europe. And if that is the case, probably for the Chinese manufacturing sector as well.

Meanwhile the Australian equity market briefly hit a 14 month high. The Aussie dollar jumped back above US$1.02 in spite of the fact that the economic fundamentals are looking decidedly shaky as the resources boom cools, unemployment is increasing, and retailing/consumer confidence continues to decline.

Go figure.

And for something completely different this week, a grumpy garbo who's behaviour wouldn't look out of place in our Nation's capital...

Have a good week-end.

Regards,Chris.

The collapse of Lehman Brothers four years ago today was the Pearl Harbor moment of a financial crisis that, over the next few months, threatened to bring down the entire U.S. financial system.

Blame for the collapse is still being debated. People bought homes they couldn't afford, peddled by lenders who knew -- or should have known -- that the loans were destined to fail. Wall Street sucked up these loans and sold them off in bundles to investors, sometimes while making bets against those same products.

Everyone should have known better. At the top of this list were the government regulators who are supposed to protect the economy from Wall Street excesses, but who instead sat and watched as a bubble built of rotten subprime loans kept expanding.

Read more

Our CEO, Chris Gosselin, wrote this article last week for the EurekaReport.

When evaluating managed funds, "only performance is reality".

We see all sorts of claims regarding fund performances - both from the managers themselves, in some sections of the media, and in so called "independent" research reports - which try to suggest that a fund is performing well, or has gained a recommended or highly recommended rating in spite of the fact that they have lost investors' money.

There's an appropriate quote from the former head of ITT, Harold Geneen as follows: "words are words, and promises are promises, but only performance is reality".

With apologies to Mr. Geneen, but when it comes to managed funds, and hedge funds are no exception, "performance is the only reality".

In our opinion, neither a rating, a recommendation, nor the soothing words and promises in a fund's marketing material means anything if that fund has failed to perform.  Of course performance means different things to different people (as we've seen recently at the Olympics) but in the field of absolute return and hedge funds it is fair to say that investors should expect a positive return. 

According to the www.fundmonitors.com  database of absolute return and hedge funds, 43% of funds provided a positive 12 month performance to June 2012.  Although 80% of funds in the database outperformed the ASX200 it still leaves 37% of funds outperforming the ASX but failing to provide their investors with a positive return.   Well tried perhaps, but we suspect neither the fund manager nor their investors would be overly happy, and we doubt that Harold Geneen would have been impressed.

What he would have been impressed with however would have been those that provided a positive performance including the following list of the top 10 equity long/short hedge funds over 12 months to June, 2012:

An impressive list, and in these difficult times such performances were difficult to achieve to say the least.  However, as readers would understand, 12 months is not long enough to really gauge a fund manager's performance, and further examination reveals some telling trends.

In recent articles we have shown that various funds and strategies can produce significantly different performances in different market conditions.  What is interesting about the performance of funds in the 12 months to June 2012 is that those with a positive performance over the last 12 months also showed a capacity to perform over the longer term.

It is also fair to say that the strategies that performed in the volatile conditions of the past 12 months tended to be risk averse with low net market exposure, rather than the high conviction, concentrated portfolios that had provided often spectacular performance in previous years, but often with high volatility.

This suggests that the past 12 months have been tough, an opinion which is unlikely to have many readers disagreeing with.  But it also suggests that those funds able to navigate the tough markets of the past 12 months have the necessary skills and capacity to do so over the longer term. 

And some definite trends emerged, further consolidating the benefit of avoiding risk when seeking consistently positive returns over the longer term.

Further investigation showed however that performance over the past 12 months was as good a method as any of filtering risk averse managers and funds.  Only four funds with a positive 12 month performance failed to provide a positive 24 months, and of the remaining, only four fell at the three year hurdle.  Four years became a little harder, with six falling by the wayside, and over five years, a few more.

Finally 26 funds (across all strategies, investing in both equity and non equity type assets) with positive returns over one year also had positive annualised returns over past two, three, four and five years.

That would appear to be enough to really sort the wheat from the chaff, but even within this group of 26 there were some performance measures which still required refining, most notably the intra year drawdowns in 2008 at the height of the GFC.   With the market down over 50% from its peak in November 2007 we removed any fund with a drawdown of 20% or more, leaving just 17 funds remaining.

Finally we measured each fund's risk adjusted performance as measured by the Sharpe Ratio, arrived at by taking actual returns less the "risk free" cash rate, divided by volatility.  Ideally this should produce a number as close to one as possible, but we took the top ten to produce our list of "best funds".

No doubt there will be arguments from some that this methodology is imperfect, and we readily admit that there more ways than this to filter good funds from bad.  For instance, some investors may not be so concerned about volatility, preferring to just take a fund's long term annualised return as the true measure of performance, and of course what suits one investor's risk and return appetite may not suit another's.

The list below also excludes some newer managers who don't have a five year track record, but somewhere along the way a line has to be drawn.  If good enough they'll no doubt appear in these columns next year, or the year after. 

So stripping away the words and promises of the marketers, here are 12 funds which have provided positive returns over five years to June 2012, while having a drawdown of no more than 15% during that time.    Performances over 24 to 60 months are annualised:  Sorted alphabetically.

By any standard this is an impressive performance from each of the above funds, but to have provided investors with positive returns each year over five years during some of the most difficult and turbulent market conditions is a significant achievement.  The fact that they are all "hedge funds" should dispel the myth that they are risky and speculative, and in fact reinforces one of the common factors amongst all the funds on the list:  First and foremost they consider the risk of loss of capital as more important, or at least equally important as providing a positive return.

Remember, "only performance is reality".

Chris Gosselin

The Church of England's pension fund has given its blessing to some of the world's biggest hedge fund managers, putting its faith in an industry much maligned for poor returns in recent years, its annual report showed.

Read the entire article...

Former Nomura Holdings Inc trader Jean-Noel Payer is preparing to launch a $250 million Asia-focused volatility hedge fund aiming to take advantage of price swings in Asian securities, in one of the biggest startups in the region this year.

Payer, 36, who was a managing director at Nomura and worked with trader Benjamin Fuchs at the bank, told Reuters that he was setting up Voltex Asia Capital Ltd in Hong Kong. His firm received regulatory clearance on Tuesday.

He declined to disclose the start-up capital but a source familiar with his plans said he had commitments worth $250 million in a managed account for investors in the United States.

This puts Voltex among the top launches in Asia so far this year, following $440 million raised by Alp Ercil, the former Asia head of Perry Capital, and $195 million gathered by former UBS Australia trader Gerard Satur for his MST Capital.

"We target to be fully operational and launch in September," Payer said in an interview, adding that 95 percent of the fund's assets will be invested in Asia.

The move comes as many proprietary desk traders leave banks in light of the Volcker rule that limits the extent to which banks can trade in financial markets with their own capital.

Payer, a French national who came to Hong Kong in 1999, joins the likes of Fuchs, former Goldman Sachs trader Morgan Sze, and former head of JPMorgan Chase equity derivatives group for Asia-Pacific William Lee in moving away from proprietary desks to start their own hedge funds in Asia.

New Asian hedge funds raised $2 billion in the first half of the year with an average launch size of about $63 million, a survey released last week by industry tracker AsiaHedge showed.

Some startups are attracting capital despite tough times for the $127 billion Asian hedge fund industry, which has seen net outflows in 2012 and more than 40 funds closing down, according to research firm Eurekahedge.

Payer's hedge fund will combine volatility arbitrage and macro strategies, and will trade equity, fixed income and forex.

Volatility -- or the fear gauge -- refers to the rate of change in the price of an asset. It increases when uncertainty grows. Macro hedge funds focus on major economic trends and events and put their money wherever they see value.

Payer, a sailing enthusiast, ran the volatility trading team for Fuchs, who has now started his own hedge fund, BFAM Partners, in Hong Kong with backing from Nomura.

Fuchs' team, which started trading in April 2009, produced a 48 percent return for that calendar year, followed by 20 percent in 2010. The return in 2011, when peers in the Eurekahedge Asia index lost an average 8.4 percent, was about 1 percent, according to a marketing document obtained by Reuters.

Read the full article...

All asset managers will have to return to investors in their funds any profits made from lending out securities in Europe under new rules that threaten to wipe out a lucrative source of revenues for some of the world's biggest investment firms.

The rules set by Europe's main market regulator aim to to ensure that fund investors gain the benefit from securities lending, a common practice across the fund management industry.

 With 66% of funds results in for June, there's a pretty good idication of the best funds for the past 12 months.