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In the week ending August 2nd 2019, reports said hedge fund Coatue launched a $700m venture fund that will focus on early-stage investments. The New York-based firm submitted a filing for the vehicle with the SEC in November.

Set up as a technology sector hedge fund by Philippe Laffont after leaving Tiger Management in 1999, Coatue has been investing in public and private equity markets and already backs a number of high-profile unicorns, including DoorDash, Instacart and Lime. However, the goal to invest $700m in early-stage tech is viewed as a major extension of its investment focus, and it will be interesting to see if more traditional hedge funds will follow suit and shift focus to the more illiquid, private markets.

The biggest hedge fund startup so far this year is San Francisco-based Woodline Partners with $2 billion in investor commitments and former Citadel traders Michael Rockefeller and Karl Kroeker at the helm.

Further in new launches, Maarten Petermann, who spent nearly two decades at JPMorgan Chase & Co., is preparing to start a hedge fund with at least $500 million of assets; Private-equity investor Welsh Carson Anderson & Stowe has closed the largest fund in its four-decade history, collecting $4.3bn for its flagship investment vehicle, and LGPS Central, the pooling vehicle for nine local authority pension funds in central England, has raised £700m ($864m) from four of its partner funds for an emerging market equities mandate.

Meanwhile, BlackRock, the world's largest asset management firm, announced that it has raised $2bn for its flagship opportunistic credit fund, Global Credit Opportunities (GCO); Advent International, a U.S. private equity firm with $36 billion in assets under managem......................

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