Fonte: asaps.it

Un’immagine azzeccata per definire lo stato attuale degli USA è quella che li dipinge come un paziente dopo un grave incidente automobilistico: dopo il crollo di Lehman Brothers i medici (FED e Amministrazione americana) hanno tamponato le ferite e fermato le emorragie, e ora stanno somministrando massicce dosi di ricostituenti mentre è iniziata la fase riabilitativa (Ethan S. Harris  -  Merrill Lynch). I segnali di ritrovata salute si manifestano solitamente dal lato della produzione, anche se talvolta, come nell’ultima settimana, confortano di più i deboli, ma positivi, segnali che arrivano dai consumi (vendite al dettaglio +1,4% a Ottobre mese su mese, e terzo incremento consecutivo delle vendite “core”). Il dato di Ottobre della produzione (+0,1%) è stato deludente, il più modesto degli aumenti degli ultimi quattro mesi: insomma, due passi avanti, uno indietro.

A questo proposito, converrà notare fin da ora che con ogni probabilità il dato dell’aumento trimestrale del PIL USA del terzo trimestre verrà rivisto al ribasso martedì prossimo, e portato dall’euforico +3,5% ad un più mite +2,6 – 3%.

Ma mentre il malato zoppica e fa le sue prove riabilitative, il terreno intorno a lui viene mantenuto pulito e pianeggiante: tutte le banche centrali del mondo industrializzato cantano all’unisono lo stesso ritornello “i tassi di interesse resteranno bassi a lungo e finchè ce ne sarà bisogno” (FED, BCE e BOJ). Sottolineiamo che non esiste una regola analoga alla Taylor’s Rule su quanto a lungo sia opportuno tenere bassi i tassi per ottenere una ripresa stabile; mentre gli accademici sono riusciti a formulare un metodo di condotta che mette in relazione tassi di interesse e inflazione, tassi e sviluppo economico costituiscono ancora territorio inesplorato dove necessariamente si naviga a vista.

Quanto alle strategie di uscita dall’attuale politica monetaria (“exit strategies”) queste costituiranno il motivo conduttore di molte dichiarazioni ai giornali e lanci televisivi al di là della reale consistenza delle notizie. Un piccolo vademecum su come si deve comportare l’investitore scafato è il seguente:
a. Concentrarsi sulle dichiarazioni dei membri meno estremisti delle Banche centrali, sia falchi sia colombe; eliminare come rumore di fondo le tesi oltranziste
b. Tenere in conto che gli istituti che battono moneta sono fatti di funzionari pubblici, non di esperti di comunicazione, e che gaffes e incomprensioni saranno possibili su materia così incandescente. Ricordare che i falchi crederanno più di una volta di essere arrivati al momento fatidico, e grideranno “Al lupo !” prematuramente.

A corroborare la posizione attuale rilassata delle banche centrali stanno i dati sull’inflazione: nell’Unione Europea siamo a +1,2%, ampiamente sotto il livello massimo previsto dalla BCE, pari al 2%. USA e Giappone sono ancora più tranquilli.

La settimana che inizia lunedì 23 è ricca di dati, in particolare nel suo primo giorno (PMI o “Purchasing Managers’ Index” dei servizi, del manifatturiero e composito) in Europa e poi negli States con dati sulle case, sui profitti, e con le minute delle riunioni FED del 3 e 4 Novembre scorso, contenenti le previsioni su inflazione, sviluppo e occupazione. Giovedì 26, invece, Festa del Ringraziamento e mercati chiusi.

CONCLUSIONI

Non ci sembra di vedere cambiamenti di rilievo rispetto alla rotta tracciata: l’economia è in lenta e faticosa ripresa, e ogni giorno che passa riguadagna vigore, salvo piccole ricadute prontamente tamponate ove ce ne sia bisogno (vedi il prolungamento del programma di rottamazione auto negli USA fino ad Aprile 2010). Ridurre le posizioni in titoli di Stato e monetario allo stretto indispensabile, puntare su settori dove il rapporto rischio-rendimento è equilibrato: obbligazionario emergente a breve, azionario selettivo e hedge funds.

Stelvio Bo – Bonoplus – www.bonoplus.it – Milano

Big Moving Stock scans the stock market for stock picks using volume analysis, trend signal indicators, chart patterns, and investor sentiment from twitter.
http://www.bigmovingstock.com/index.php?ch=RIMM

Fund redemptions are nothing new. Every recession or bear market sees investors redeeming their fund investments and moving to asset classes which provide a greater degree of safety. For most, this is the Government Treasury Bill also called the T-Bill.

While reasons for redemptions are as varied as the investment selections themselves, it seems that individual investors are uncertain of their understanding of what their money has been invested in. While mutual funds are marketed to the investor with a lower knowledge of investment products, the hedge fund has always been the investment choice for more knowledgeable investors or the “Accredited Investor”. But now it seems even this group is calling for the need of greater understanding from their investment managers.

The battle for returns which out perform the index has resulted in many Portfolio Managers refusing to disclose their trading program for fear others will duplicate their trading style. It is said by many managers that it’s this ability to observe unique characteristics in the market place that differentiates their funds performance from the typical returns generated by bottom quartile performing funds and fund managers. Of course the unregulated hedge fund industry has perpetuated this myth by trusting the Accredited Investor with an above average knowledge of the market and his ability to select the correct investment for their portfolio. It seems the Accredited Investors does not always posses greater knowledge than their more un-sophisticated mutual fund brethren.

So that bears the question of how to obtain this transparency to the satisfaction of the investing public? And the answer is the Managed Account.

Managed Accounts are simply individual accounts opened in the name of the investor. These accounts are not pooled, yet they are identically structured and managed by the hedge fund Portfolio Manager in the same style as the pooled fund. The critical difference is the investors ability to see every trading transaction performed in the account by the fund manager.

The popularity of the pooled investment structure is that investors do not have to deposit large sums of money to utilize the services of a professional Portfolio Manager. Most successful professional Portfolio Managers do not accept accounts less than US$10 million dollars.

The hedge fund and mutual fund gained popularity by allowing smaller sums of money to be pooled with other deposits from many other investors. So while you can currently participate in a hedge fund investment for $100,000, and a mutual fund for $50., a managed account may require a minimum investment in excess of $1 million. Not so good for everybody.

But lets suppose you can convince your hedge fund manager to accept your $100,000 what advantage do you gain.

1. the investment account is actually in your name and not in the funds name;
2. your account is segregated from all other trading accounts;
3. instead of waiting for your monthly or quarterly statements, you can see the activity in your account on a daily basis in real time;
4. cash deposits or withdrawals can be simplified;
5. you have an overall increase of account transparency; and
6. you can no longer claim you did not know what was going on in your account. (oops, is that a benefit).

There are also some disadvantages. Or put another way, the pooled investment structure provides some distinct advantages which originally made them popular since the first hedge fund was created in 1949. These funds should not be confused with the investment account managed by your stock broker. The professional Portfolio Manager will continue to exercise complete trading autonomy and does not want your advice on how to manage the assets in your account.

Advantages for remaining in a hedge fund or mutual fund:
1. investors can obtain the services of a professional fund manager with smaller sums of money;
2. management costs are cheaper since it is more economical to manage one large account instead of many smaller accounts;
3. you pay one flat management fee, no commissions; and best of all
4. you still have someone to blame if things go wrong.

It is estimated that the hedge fund industry managed $2.7 trillion dollars by the end of 2008. The mutual fund industry manages $19 trillion investment dollars. So there is no question of the popularity of the industry since that first fund in 1949.

If transparency is an issue for you, you need to take a long, hard look and evaluate the pros and cons wisely. Take some time to speak with your fund manager about a managed account, it just might be the alternative you’ve been looking for.

Dwayne Strocen is a registered CTA and derivatives analyst assessing market risk for institutional investors. He also manages the Global Climate CTA Fund, which is focused on the reduction of greenhouse gases and global warming. Website: http://www.genuineCTA.com

View more information about his managed account program and about trading greenhouse gases.

Big Moving Stock scans the stock market for stock picks using volume analysis, trend signal indicators, chart patterns, and investor sentiment from twitter.
http://www.bigmovingstock.com/index.php?ch=BAC

Hedge fund managers and punters betting on the fall of the world (you guys who call yourselves bankers and money managers, you know who I am talking about, don’t pretend you don’t) should know better than to allow their existence to become public knowledge. That means no interviews, no publicity, no shining a light into the dark corner of the world where you live. No one likes you. Everyone hates you. You are pariah, the unclean, the class of bottom feeder that we know exist but would rather not think about.

Your status in society is right down there with garbage picker, sin eater, carpetbagger and executioner. We know you exist but polite people don’t talk about it.

You are like the Burakumin in Shinto societies. Outcast, unclean, tainted by your profession. If we put a sign on your forehead or hung a scarlet letter around your neck, people would cover their noses, avert their faces and cross the street to avoid coming in contact with you. There is a reason the executioner’s of old wore hoods. They could not afford to have their identity become common knowledge to the general population. It may have been a good paying job but it didn’t pay enough to insulate them from the village and the people they lived with every day. In kind, the people did not want to know who was under the hood. They did not want to know who of their friends and neighbors were reduced to killing for a living, who could remove their human soul long enough to chop off someone’s head.

In Japan, you became senmin (despised citizen) just by killing animals and processing their flesh. The “evil vapors” of your profession rose up from your work, clung to your skin and tainted your life. In traditional Jewish societies, the preparers and consumers of non-Kosher food had the same taint. In India, it is the garbage handlers.

The Romans, in their declining era, forgot that. They forgot that associating with the negative energies tainted you with its negative poison. Perhaps the truism that if one lives by the sword, one dies by the sword was invented by the Romans.

They stripped the world of entire species and threw them into the ring with humans to battle to the death and bet on the outcome. The handlers, hunters, fighters and executioners became notorious and admired. People flocked to the coliseums to bet upon the life or death of animals and humans alike. It became an integral part of their economic structure. Fortunes were made betting on death. I am sure they were placing bets on the outcome of their own demise as the barbarian hordes descended upon their cities.

In the world of money, where men work in glass and steel towers high above the street level, where the suffering of the world, the death of a planet, the evisceration of a society, the torture, agony and dying of millions is sanitized and cleaned and disconnected from the movement of numbers across a computer screen, where men make billions of dollars while not actually adding anything of value back into the system from which they feed, they have created their own closed senmin villages. Their wealth isolates them from the greater community. They have come to believe that the measure of their success is measured by the numbers in their banks accounts. (perhaps a perversion of the drive to become the best bower bird on the block by collecting a pile of useless blue things that they might attract the best mate, but somehow subverted so that their love of their numbers has derailed their connection to family and village and wife and children. How else could they do what they do and still sleep at night?)

Do not rest easy, oh men in your high towers. The Romans also thought themselves invincible. After all, had they not conquered a planet? Did not phalanxes of slaves and servants and sycophants buffer them from the barbaric outer world? Yet, in the end, all that wealth could not cleanse them of the taint of death and Death, impervious to bribery or seduction, came hunting them and gave them back in kind, what they had sown upon the world.

Perhaps they had forgotten, in their isolation from humans who actually still had souls, that to a majority of the planet, money, wealth and power are useless ideas. Perhaps they thought that the rules and laws and Patterns of the Oneverse could be overwritten if one could control everything.

But “everything” is a very large thing indeed and humans are very small and the Oneverse cannot be denied without consequence.

Perhaps that is why very wealthy men such as Carnegie, Hughes and Gates, in the fading end of their lives, took large chunks of their money and established foundations that have and will outlive their own notoriety. History is a funny thing. Nobody remembers you if you are filthy rich. They will remember what you built or what you destroyed. So if you give back a little of what you have taken, legends of your generosity will outlive your grandchildren.

See. No matter how black your heart has become, the Oneverse offers redemption.

Say it ain’t so! There are allegations of fraud today against a hedge fund. Dynamic Decisions Capital Management, founded by Alberto Micalizzi, has had it’s main fund, worth an alleged $500 million taken over. The fund is based in the Cayman Islands and is being liquidated by the firm Grant Thornton. The primary allegation is that the fund purchased bonds outside the scope of the fund parameters and that the bonds were of questionable value.

These stories are a dime a dozen. I meet with people every day-smart people- who do really stupid stuff with their money. Many invest in private equity and hedge funds. These investment vehicles are largely unregulated. Based on my experience and observation very few investors make money in hedge funds or in private equity. Typically the only people who make money are the fund managers. Managers make money regardless of whether the funds make money. These deals are usually structured where the managers take a 2% management fee and then take 20% of any profits. That means that if a fund manages $100 million (very small by today’s standards) management makes $2 million per year in management fees alone.

The funds that are especially troublesome are the ones where the managers do not invest any of their own money alongside investors. These folks use leverage that is often called “OPM” – other peoples money.

The problem for many of these funds now is that there are fewer opportunities for investment. There is so much money “on the sidelines” right now, it is very difficult for these funds to find worthy investment vehicles. Another problem is that these funds typically look at highly leveraged deals. And lenders who used to invest in a debt portion are very leery of these private fund deals. Finally a manager doesn’t make his management fee unless he has put the investment money to use. This can cause a manager to stretch on deals that are marginal just to make certain he has deployed the capital. This often leads to lousy investment decisions.

If you are thinking about investing in private equity or hedge funds there are a number of questions you need to ask before taking that leap. Call me before you invest. It will be a much more pleasant call than the call you make to me after you have already invested. Here an ounce of prevention really is worth a pound of cure.

By Saijel Kishan and Cristina Alesci

Aug. 13 (Bloomberg) — John Paulson, the hedge-fund manager whose wagers against the U.S. housing market helped him earn an estimated $2.5 billion last year, bought Bank of America Corp. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. stock in the second quarter, while adding to stakes in gold companies.

His firm, Paulson & Co., bought 168 million shares of Charlotte, North Carolina-based Bank of America valued at $2.2 billion as of June 30, according to a filing yesterday with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. It was the biggest new purchase in the second quarter for Paulson, 53, and made him the bank’s fourth-largest owner.

“It’s ironic because he was the one that made the right call shorting subprime,” said Jerome Dodson, who oversees $2.5 billion at Parnassus Investments in San Francisco. “His timing is good but he probably won’t be as successful with this purchase as he was with betting the housing market would collapse.”

Paulson, who manages about $29 billion, last year started a hedge fund, called Paulson Recovery fund, to invest in financial firms hurt by mortgage writedowns. He boosted investments in gold companies this year to help mitigate potential inflation as governments worldwide increase spending to help their economies recover from recession. Gold has gained 7.7 percent this year.

Stefan Prelog, a spokesman for New York-based Paulson, declined to comment on the filing.

Bank Stocks

Bank of America gained 94 percent in the second quarter as concern the government would take an ownership stake eased amid signs of an improving economy. Paulson also bought 2 million shares of Goldman Sachs, the New York-based investment bank, in the period.

He ended the quarter with 7 percent of the UltraShort Financials ProShares exchange-traded fund, which is used by investors who expect bank shares to decline. The fund declined 57 percent in the quarter as the Dow Jones U.S. Financials Index rose 29 percent. Paulson’s 2 million shares were valued at $84 million on June 30.

Bank of America is the second-largest home lender, trailing Wells Fargo & Co., after acquiring Countrywide Financial Corp. last year. Countrywide lost $703.5 million in 2007 and almost collapsed under the weight of defaulting subprime mortgages.

Paulson’s filing came a day after Timothy Barakett, founder of the $5.5 billion Atticus Capital LP, said he was closing his $3.5 billion Atticus Global Fund to spend more time with his family and concentrate on philanthropic interests. Atticus bought Bank of America shares valued at $355 million in the second quarter, according to a regulatory filing on Aug. 10.

Betting on Gold

Paulson’s stake in the bank is the fund’s second-biggest holding after SPDR Gold Trust. He left unchanged his 9 percent stake in the investment fund that buys gold bullion, according to the filing.

His firm became the largest holder of Johannesburg-based gold producer AngloGold Ashanti Ltd. after buying 40 million shares to end the quarter with a 12 percent stake. Paulson also increased his stake in Johannesburg-based Gold Fields Ltd., becoming the third-largest owner of its U.S.-listed shares.

The fund reduced its stake in Market Vectors Gold Miners ETF, a fund that mirrors moves in the Amex Gold Miners Index, after selling 11 million shares. He owned a 5.3 percent stake in the fund in the second quarter valued at $227 million, down from 15 percent in the first three months of the year.

The hedge fund manager left unchanged a 4.4 percent stake in mining firm Kinross Gold Corp., according to the filing.

Paulson’s Pay

Paulson earned an estimated $2.5 billion last year, according to Institutional Investor’s Alpha Magazine. His Credit Opportunities Fund soared almost sixfold in 2007 on bets that subprime mortgages would plummet.

Last year, his largest fund, the Advantage Plus Fund, returned 37 percent, compared with a loss of 19 percent for hedge funds on average. The fund has gained 16 percent this year. The industry has returned 12 percent, according to Hedge Fund Research Inc.

Money managers who oversee more than $100 million in equities must file a Form 13F within 45 days of each quarter’s end to list their U.S.-traded stocks, options and convertible bonds. The filings don’t show non-U.S. securities or how much cash the firms hold.

Paulson reported holdings valued at $17.1 billion at the end of June compared with $9.3 billion at the end of the first quarter. He placed bets during the quarter on companies including Sun Microsystems Inc. and Wyeth that are takeover targets.

Tech, Drug Stocks

Paulson bought 74 million shares of Santa Clara, California-based Sun Microsystems, which is being taken over by Oracle Corp. for $7.4 billion. The new purchase was his second- largest in the second quarter, according to the filing.

The hedge fund increased its stake in Madison, New Jersey- based Wyeth, which is set to be acquired by Pfizer Inc., by buying 18 million shares of the drugmaker, according to the filing.

Paulson also increased his stake in Schering-Plough Corp. after buying 44 million shares in the Kenilworth, New Jersey- based firm. Schering-Plough agreed in March to be taken over by Merck & Co.

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The Reason Your Banker Is Always Smiling

If the latest stats are to be believed, upwards of 80% of the money “invested” by Filipinos is parked in typical garden-variety savings accounts.  For tens of millions of Filipinos, having a savings account is regarded as safe, practical and prudent.

These same savings account holders would be astounded to learn, however, that relative to returns banks charge higher fees than the world’s top hedge fund managers.

How is this possible?  It’s simple math, actually.

The Glossy Brochure offers savings accounts with  a whopping 1.5% per annum (for those of us who don’t speak Latin that’s per year).  Behind the scenes, they take your deposit, pool it with the savings of other unsophisticated investors,  and buy a government bond with a fixed rate of interest, say 6%.

By the end of the year, assuming your account hasn’t dipped below the minimum required monthly balance, the bank gives you your 1.5% and keeps 4.5%.  In other words, you get 25% of the total return and the bank gets 75% of the total return.

The Hedge Fund comparison

By contrast, let’s say you’ve been fortunate enough to be in a hedge fund managed by George Soros, and that fund generates a 6% return for the year.  George, like most world-class hedge-fund managers, would typically charge a fee of 20% against the return. Take note, however, that many funds have a “hurdle” provision–meaning the performance fee is only 10% of the return for annual returns of 0-10%, then escalates to 20% of the return for annual returns above 10%.

Meaning, if Soros’ fund only produced a measly 6% return, his performance fee would only be 10%–George would give you 5.4% and he would keep .6%.  In other words, you get 90% of the total return and George Soros gets 10% of the total return

There you have it.  Against a 6% annual return, George Soros’ fee would be 10% of the return.  Your bank, on the other hand, walks away with 75% of the return–over seven times the fee of George Soros!

No wonder your bank is always happy to see you.