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New Hedge Fund Firms Say They Can Profit in Tough Markets
Prominent global macro hedge funds are struggling. Several upstart firms believe they have found a way to turn challenging circumstances into an opportunity.

Bacon has called his 2012 results disappointing. As of mid-November his flagship, $4.6 billion Moore Global Investment Fund, had returned just 3.72 percent on the year. But thats a relatively strong performance. Global diversified macro funds gained an average of 1.62 percent during the same period, according to HSBC Holdings alternative-investment group, compared with 14.28 percent for the Standard & Poors 500 Index. And its not just macro hedge funds that are struggling: Year-to-date through October 31, the HFRI Fund Weighted Composite Index had gained only 4.33 percent.
A new crop of hedge fund managers believe they can make money in todays challenging conditions, even if they dont agree on how to do it. Take Infineon Capital Management, a New York shop being launched by Imran Hussain and Mead Welles. The pair combine macro and relative-value strategies, investing across asset classes and markets with a focus on emerging economies, where they see more growth potential than in debt-burdened developed markets.
The characteristics of the crisis in the developed world are very much emerging-market-like in nature and not well understood by G-7 [market] participants, says CIO Hussain, previously head of emerging-markets debt portfolios at $3.5 trillion, New Yorkbased investment firm BlackRock. Their investment frameworks did not anticipate the potential for zero-interest-rate policies and asset price targeting mechanisms by central banks, he adds. We are witnessing economic distortions on an epic scale, and this tale is far from over.
Hussain and Welles met when they were traders at Cargill Financial Services International, the emerging-markets investing arm of U.S. commodities giant Cargill. Before launching Infineon, Welles spent more than a decade running Octagon Asset Management, a New York hedge fund firm focused on asset-backed lending.
Suvretta Capital Management, a $50 million hedge fund firm founded by Aaron Cowen, a former manager at SAC Capital Advisors and Soros Fund Management, identifies the same market trends as Infineon and Moore. Like them, New Yorkbased Suvretta blends macro and fundamental analysis, but it focuses on long-short U.S. equity. Cowen contends that returns can still be found in the U.S. and other developed markets by taking long positions in large-cap, liquid stocks with strong growth stories and shorting industries that are contracting. In contrast to many traditional long-short equity hedge funds, Suvretta chooses a sector, then picks stocks.
Patrick Wolff, founder and CEO of $90 million, San Franciscobased long-short equity hedge fund firm Grandmaster Capital Management, also sees plenty of opportunity in U.S. equities. Wolff doubts that emerging markets will perform well over the next few years and is especially bearish on China. Hedge fund managers have to be able to spot where the bull and bear markets are, he says, asserting that the action is now in the former. In the decade before 2008, emerging markets, global credit and commodities experienced bull markets while U.S. equities slumped. Now, as credit contracts and U.S. stocks surge, that scenario is almost totally reversed, Wolff says. But many hedge fund managers invest like its still 2007.
It remains to be seen whether these new hedge fund firms will navigate choppy markets better than titans like Moore. But Grandmasters main fund was up more than 24 percent on the year through October 31, according to an investor letter, while Suvretta had gained 15 percent.