Brief: One hedge fund may shut an office in Asia permanently and have employees work from home. Another may dramatically shrink its Manhattan headquarters. Meanwhile, industry titan Millennium Management has a 50-point checklist for reopening offices that includes air filtration and an application process for staff who want to come in. Around town, rivals are discussing procuring infrared temperature scanners for entryways and plexiglass dividers to slide between desks. If Wall Street’s big banks are adopting off-the-rack approaches to reopening skyscrapers to armies of employees, the asset management industry’s solutions are much more bespoke. Interviews with almost a dozen industry players show their plans are idiosyncratic and may go to new extremes. It reflects their need to protect star traders at any cost, but also the reality that they have less control over buildings shared with other tenants.
Brief: Asset managers will have to explain how they ignored the risk to their investments posed by a pandemic like Covid-19, under the new UK Stewardship Code that came into force this year. BlackRock, Fidelity International, Standard Life Aberdeen, Schroders and Legal & General Investment Management are among the leading companies that say they did not raise pandemic risk in discussions with companies or take it into account in investment decisions. Under the new code, asset managers are required to publish a report detailing “how they have identified and responded to market-wide and systemic risks” and “how they aligned their investments accordingly”. Even though the new code applies only from the start of the year, the Financial Reporting Council, the regulator that oversees the code, says that companies will be expected to say whether they took any account of pandemic risk before the outbreak.
Brief: A cluster of big name hedge funds have started betting against French companies, moving in after the lifting of a short-selling ban imposed earlier this year to calm financial markets, an analysis of regulatory filings showed. France joined Italy, Spain, Belgium, Austria and Greece in dropping short-selling bans last week. They had banned the practice for many stocks two months ago to curb extreme stock market volatility caused by economic uncertainty that has resulted from the coronavirus lockdowns. Hedge funds engage in so-called “short-selling” by borrowing a stock from an institutional investor, such as a pension fund, and selling it back when the shares fall, pocketing the profit… Citadel, Marshall Wace and Millennium are among hedge funds that have taken out short positions on French companies over the past week, with Peugeot (PEUP.PA) and Air France-KLM (AIRF.PA) among the most prominent targets. British hedge fund Sandbar Asset Management took the opportunity to double its short position in Air France to 1.2% of the company’s equity capital on May 20, from 0.6% on March 17.
Brief: Rich Chinese investors are finding luxury real estate is a good hiding place from the economic fallout of the coronavirus. Across China and in some of their familiar hunting grounds in Asia, wealthy buyers are snapping up top-end housing, in many cases to guard their wealth against anticipated inflation and a weakening yuan. The rush to add real estate has led to a jump in upmarket housing prices in China, while offering some support for Asian property markets hit hard by the pandemic. "It's been flat-out," said Monika Tu, founder of Black Diamondz, an Australian company that caters to Chinese buyers of luxury real estate. Since March, Tu has sold A$85 million (S$79.3 million) of prime property, with about half the sales to Chinese clients who were in Australia when the pandemic hit. That's a 25 per cent jump from earlier in the year. The homes, priced between A$7.25 million and A$19.5 million, are all in Sydney's well-heeled, ocean-front suburbs such as Point Piper.
Brief: The novel coronavirus outbreak and economic fallout is proving to be a bonanza for whistleblower lawyers as the U.S. securities regulator cracks down on a range of related misconduct from companies touting sham cures to misuse of federal aid. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) fielded about 4,000 complaints from mid-March to mid-May, a 35% increase on the year-ago period, Steven Peikin, the agency’s co-head of enforcement, said this month as cases of COVID-19, the respiratory illness caused by the coronavirus, shot up… Getnick said a broad range of misconduct related to the COVID-19 outbreak, such as loan fraud, price-gouging, counterfeit or substandard medical goods, or healthcare fraud, could potentially find their way into the SEC’s remit, due to the breadth of U.S. securities law.
Brief: Father-of-six Nicolas Bryon didn’t get much sleep in March but it wasn’t family duties keeping him up. As global markets crashed, the Sydney-based hedge-fund manager rose every hour to check on his positions and execute trades. After weeks of broken sleep, his Atlantic Pacific Australian Equity Fund was up 23.6% for March and April, making it one of the rare hedge funds globally that made money in both periods. The two wildly different months messed with even some of the biggest money managers. In March, several bears reaped fortunes by betting on falling markets, only to lose money in April when government stimulus revived stocks. Globally, just 13% of hedge funds made money in both months, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. A number of those that did exhibited similar traits: an ability to trade across different geographies or asset classes and a hyper-vigilance toward monitoring positions.