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Kirsten Bischoff, Opalesque New York:

Last week, we heard of just a few fund launches from Threadneedle (emerging market macro), Pine River Capital (liquid mortgage fund), and a new commodity quant fund from Swedish firm Alfakraft Fonder, as well as UCITS funds from Man Group (European FoHFs) and Stigma Partners (global macro). Although the number of launches has dwindled recently, Conifer Securities CEO Jack McDonald offered some hope for future growth, reporting to Bloomberg this week that his firm was seeing an uptick in the number of startup hedge funds launching.

Asia was the site of multiple closures including Marble Bar’s Asia fund (after it dropped from $530m to $100m in assets), and Hong Kong-based DragonBack Capital, which has liquidated its two hedge funds in order to re-launch as a hedge fund platform.

The Greenwich Composite Investable Index reported this week its August gains of +0.29%.

Even though Casey Quirk Partner Yariv Itah predicted this week that hedge fund assets would surge 65% to $2.8bn in the next three years, assets by and large have not grown at the pace anticipated after 2009’s strong performance. What few funds that have seen allocations, have been the biggest, dividing the industry into super funds with assets well over $5bn and small funds with assets below $500m. And assets continue to funnel to the very top with AR Magazine reporting that the top third of the super hedge funds manage 71% of the assets in the “billion dollar club”. In this “club” Bridgewater Assets leads the pack with $51bn followed by JP Morgan Asset Management ($41bn), Soros Fund Management, Och Ziff Capital Management, and BlackRock.

But even large firms sometimes feel the pain. Notably absent from the AR biggest managers list was DE Shaw, ......................

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