posted by Jack Lee
(Bloomberg) — The global hedge-fund industry lost $100 billion of assets in October, according to an estimate from Eurekahedge Pte, as firms including Sparx Group Co. were hammered by investor withdrawals.
Clients took about $60 billion out of funds, Singapore-based Eurekahedge said in a statement. Funds fell 3.3 percent on average, based on preliminary figures from the Singapore-based data provider, as measured by the Eurekahedge Hedge Fund Index, which tracks the performance of more than 2,000 funds that invest globally. That compares with a 19 percent slide in the MSCI World Index last month.
The biggest market losses since the Great Depression and investor withdrawals hurt the $1.7 trillion hedge-fund industry that manages largely unregulated pools of capital. The index of global funds has lost 11 percent this year, set for the worst performance since 2000 when Eurekahedge began tracking the data.
“This wave of redemptions in the hedge-fund industry is going to last for at least another six months,” said Toyomi Kusano, president of Kusano Global Frontier, a hedge-fund research firm in Tokyo. “There are some funds that halted withdrawals, but those funds would eventually have to defreeze, and that means another wave of redemptions.”