Brief: Cash-rich private debt and equity providers are hunting for viable pandemic-hit businesses to fund, according to London-listed alternative asset manager Intermediate Capital Group PLC. “If a business has a shortfall purely due to Covid-19, there is plenty of capital to support them,” said Nicholas Brooks, ICG’s head of economic and investment research in a telephone interview. European private debt managers had almost $93 billion of capital available as of December 2020, with over $295 billion in the hands of private equity, according to data provider Preqin. That cash could help out a lot of companies bearing the brunt of the pandemic that have already tapped out government-backed emergency loans. It’s a relatively expensive option, but may be the only one open to some of the hardest hit sectors as parts of Europe enter their third lockdown. That means yet more pain for many of the firms identified by ICG in their analysis of financial data for around 500 private companies. Hardest hit were automotive and components, travel, hotels, restaurants and leisure, and retail, which endured months of almost zero revenues last year. “Private debt and private equity have record levels of dry powder,” Brooks added. “Funds aren’t the issue, it’s really whether a business is viewed as viable in the long-run.” It’s also a question of whether borrowers can afford the money on offer.
Brief: The pandemic has made one thing abundantly clear for hedge funds: Trading a once-in-a-century crisis is best left to humans. Funds that survive largely on their ability to place high-conviction bets made some of their strongest returns in decades last year. Some of the industry’s best-known names such as Brevan Howard Asset Management, Millennium Management and Andurand Capital Management soared past peers as stormy markets provided rich pickings. That’s thrown a wrench into the rise of computer-driven quant funds, which gobbled up assets year after year but couldn’t protect investors or make money in 2020. Algorithms largely failed to decipher the impact of a rapidly moving virus and the response from central banks to contain economic damage. The “narrative was: stock selection is dead, the future is all about indexing and quants and the blackbox and all that,” said Craig Bergstrom, chief investment officer at the $7.5 billion Corbin Capital Partners that invests in hedge funds. “It’s another kind of arms race and there are winners, but there are definitely also losers, and it’s not the future of active management.” The market selloff in March and subsequent recovery humbled some of the most sophisticated of quants last year -- most notably behemoths such as Renaissance Technologies, Winton and Two Sigma.
Brief: Investor optimism has increased “significantly” since the start of the pandemic, according to a new survey. The Scotia Global Asset Management Investor Sentiment Index found that investor optimism spiked from a reading of 100 in May to 117 in November. The reading was even higher — 130 — among investors who use advisors. Eight-two per cent of investors who’d met with an advisor in the past six months said they felt more confident about their investments, compared to 56% of investors who hadn’t met with an advisor. The survey also found that 80% of investors who use advisors felt they were on track to meet their financial goals, and 90% were somewhat or very confident about funding their retirements. Scotia commissioned Environics to conduct an online poll of 1,024 investors with a minimum of $25,000 in household investable assets from Nov. 10 to Nov. 19, 2020. Online polls cannot be assigned a margin of error because they do not randomly sample the population.
Brief: Venture capital backed companies in the United States raised nearly $130 billion last year, setting a record despite the COVID-19 pandemic, figures from data firm CB Insight released on Friday show. While the investment total is up 14% from 2019, the number of deals is down 9% to 6,022. And so-called mega-rounds, deals that are $100 million or higher also hit a record amount and number with $63 billion raised in 318 deals. “What we’re seeing is a ‘rich get richer’ phenomenon where successful, high momentum technology companies are vacuuming up most of the financing,” CB Insights chief executive Anand Sanwal told Reuters by email. He said that data showed a big drop in a very early stage investment called seed stage, and expected some of those companies that stand out to see “insatiable investor demand” with fewer competitors for the money. The trend of big investments doesn’t look like it will slow in 2021 as there is a lot of capital chasing investments, say some venture capitalists.
Brief: Commerzbank AG will take an additional 2.1 billion-euro ($2.6 billion) hit in the fourth quarter as the pandemic weighs on interest rates and drives up bad loans, pushing the lender deeper into the red as it readies a new turnaround plan. Commerzbank will write off 1.5 billion euros in goodwill on its books and set aside about 630 million euros for bad loans to reflect the impact of a second lockdown, according to a statement Friday. That’s on top of a 610 million-euro charge the Frankfurt-based bank announced last month to cover job cuts. Chief Executive Officer Manfred Knof, who took over this month, is preparing to unveil a radical restructuring after shareholders pushed out the previous leadership amid frustration with the slow pace of change. Knof and new Supervisory Board Chairman Hans-Joerg Vetter are now working on a more ambitious cost-cutting plan with about 10,000 jobs on the line, Bloomberg has reported. “After this balance sheet clean-up, we are well prepared for the road ahead of us,” Knof said in the statement. “Our goal is to make the bank more profitable in the long term.” Commerzbank shares fell as much as 4.1% after the announcement and were trading 3.1% lower at 12:56 p.m. in Frankfurt. They have fallen about 5% in the past 12 months.
Brief: The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way hedge funds do business, from raising money to investing and more. Some trends are here to stay, while others will change as the pandemic continues and eventually comes to an end. Craig Bergstrom, chief investment officer at Corbin Capital Partners, said in an email that active management had returned in 2020, exceptionally fundamental stock selection. He said results across the industry are mixed, but dispersion has meant that careful portfolio construction has been precious. "Broad hedge fund performance has certainly been disappointing in recent years," Bergstrom said. "Very low interest rates are a big part of that problem, but clearly another key factor is fund fees, which have come down, but not fast enough, which means they are consuming too much of the gross returns." He adds that it's not fair to compare hedge fund returns to stock market returns because it is nearly three times as volatile. However, in recent months, investment managers have finally started to have an easier time generating alpha. "The right hedge fund portfolio, though, has been able to deliver solid alpha, and attractive risk adjusted returns, which we think remains very attractive in a world where prospective fixed income returns are very low," Bergstrom said.