在中国投资的价值:2010年亚洲Hedge Fund 25

To say that Value Partners had a good year would be an understatement. Since April 2009 the Hong Kong–based hedge fund firm’s assets under management have almost doubled, to $5.7 billion. And to make up for a disastrous 2008, when many of its funds plunged more than 40 percent, Value Partners posted returns as high as 117 percent last year.

After three years at No. 2, Value Partners takes over the No. 1 spot in the Asia Hedge Fund 25, Institutional Investor’s ranking of the largest Asia-based single-manager hedge fund firms. But its dramatic growth in 2009 had little to do with investor inflows.

“We had minimal net subscription last year, but fund performance contributed a lot to the increasing assets under management,” says deputy CIO Louis So.

For that performance, publicly traded Value Partners owes only so much to China’s recent bull market. In 2009 the firm’s funds far outstripped the Hang Seng index, whose 52 percent rise doubled that of the Standard & Poor’s 500 index. Value Partners’ flagship, the $812 million Classic Fund, gained 82.9 percent, while its $127 million Chinese Mainland Focus Fund gained 86 percent.

与亚洲对冲基金25中大约一半的公司一样，价值合伙人依赖于多空股票策略。它采取所谓的逆势、自下而上的方式挑选亚洲股市，重点放在大中华区。仅去年一年，公司的23人团队就访问了2500家公司。

价值合作伙伴的资金往往偏向长期。但截至今年春天，该公司已通过出售指数期货对冲了大部分发行。它还可以对冲其投资组合中多达10%的个股。

With the Chinese economy cooling — the Shanghai Stock Exchange composite index was down more than 20 percent this year through May — Value Partners has boosted cash levels. Through May the Classic Fund and the Chinese Mainland Focus Fund were flat for the year. But So says Value Partners is on the lookout for bargains: “For a long-term investor like us, we are seeing some good buying opportunities.”

Assetwise, Asian hedge funds are rebuilding after a year of devastating losses and redemptions. As of April 1 the firms in the Asia Hedge Fund 25 managed $36.1 billion in assets, up 19.9 percent from a year earlier. In the first quarter of this year, however, Asian-focused hedge funds saw $700 million in net redemptions, according to Chicago-based Hedge Fund Research. During the same period the $1.67 trillion global hedge fund industry took in $13.7 billion.

纽约百仕通另类资产管理公司（blackstonealternative Asset Management）驻香港董事总经理李泰德（Ted Lee）表示，与欧洲和北美的对冲基金一样，亚洲对冲基金也在进行整合。百仕通另类资产管理公司负责监管286亿美元的对冲基金。果不其然，去年榜单上的几家小公司已经退出，而大多数大公司已经成长或站稳了脚跟。

负责经理选拔和监督的李先生说：“你的经理们已经达到了他们的能力，并且大公司倒闭了，但是其他人却渴望得到资金，最终消失了。”。

在业绩方面，亚洲对冲基金25日的2009年表现强劲，抹去了上一年的大部分严重亏损。但作为一个整体，亚洲对冲基金落后于全球同行和主要股指。HFRX亚洲综合对冲基金指数在2009年上涨了16.8%，而HFRI综合指数上涨了20%。截至5月底，这两个指数均未突破1%，但至少亚洲对冲基金跑赢了发达股市。2010年前5个月，日经225指数和标准普尔500指数分别下跌7.4%和2.3%。

If 2009 wasn’t a great year for Asian hedge funds, that had a lot to do with the sheer volume of redemptions. Even when they perform well, locally founded firms are vulnerable to withdrawals because they often don’t gate their funds. Vincent Duhamel, CEO of Hong Kong–based fund-of-hedge-funds firm Sail Advisors, says some relatively large Asian hedge funds shrank from $500 million to $50 million in just six months. “Nobody had any capital to deploy when the markets started to take off again,” adds Duhamel, whose firm oversees $2.2 billion.

一个亮点是日本。2009年对冲基金在HFR追踪的所有地区和国家中表现最差，今年5月HFRX日本指数攀升5%。

Leading the way in Japan is Tokyo-based Sparx Group Co., which falls to No. 2 after leading the Asia Hedge Fund 25 for four consecutive years. The publicly traded firm, whose assets grew 7.4 percent for the year through March, covers all of Asia through its three subsidiaries: Sparx Asset Management Co., Hong Kong–based PMA Capital Management and Cosmo Investment Management Co. of Seoul, South Korea.

Because Japan itself offers limited growth opportunities, Sparx founder and CEO Shuhei Abe says that his firm is investing in Japanese companies that serve the pan-Asian market. Sparx is also backing smart-energy-grid technology — on the grounds that Japan is a world leader in products such as hybrid cars and lithium-ion batteries. In another move, Cosmo recently applied to market its long-short funds to South Korean retail investors. “Cosmo is an institutionally driven company that will deliver institutional-quality products to retail,” Abe says.

由于资产增长44%，新加坡的阿里斯艾格合伙公司（arisaigpartners）从第5位攀升至第3位，截至今年4月，其14亿美元的亚洲基金同比增长8%。这家唯一做多的公司仍在从2008年平均51%的亏损中复苏。

排在前五位的是两家去年没有排名的公司。总部位于北京的希尔豪斯资本管理公司（Hillhouse Capital Management）以25亿美元的资产位居第四，预示着中国大陆将成为对冲基金的一员。创始人兼执行合伙人张磊于2002年获得耶鲁大学管理学院（Yale School of Management）的MBA学位。在耶鲁大学，张为耶鲁大学投资办公室的首席信息官大卫•斯文森（davidswensen）工作，后者是希尔豪斯（Hillhouse）2005年上市的种子。今年1月，张艺谋回馈了耶鲁大学管理学院（Yale School of Management）一笔幸运的88888888美元的捐款，这是耶鲁大学毕业生有史以来最大的一笔礼物。

At No. 5, Tokyo-based Bayview Asset Management Co. has made a point of doing things differently. In a country where domestic investors prefer global names, $2.1 billion Bayview won seed capital from Japanese pension funds and insurance companies for the 2002 launch of its Japanese long-short fund. One of the few firms in Japan with a license to manage domestic pension fund assets and investment trusts, it built a strong following at home before marketing abroad, says executive officer Rieko Shimojo. Today about 80 percent of Bayview’s assets come from Japanese investors.

Bayview has never accepted investments from funds of hedge funds, a decision that paid off in 2008 and 2009. “We didn’t suffer from those people coming in and out — the hot money run by funds of funds,” Shimojo says.

Conceding that domestic investors won’t be in a position to shore up its equity market anytime soon, Shimojo says Japan needs more capital from China and other Asian countries. As of this spring, Bayview had yet to meet with any Chinese investors. But one of its investment themes is Chinese forays into Japan, including acquisitions of Japanese firms. For example, Nanjing, Jiangsu–based Suning Appliance Co. now owns almost 30 percent of Japanese electronics retailer Laox Co. This year, Laox will open three stores in China.

日本的维权对冲基金行业破产five years ago, but a few shops still ply the trade. One is Tokyo-based Asuka Asset Management Co. (No. 20, with $530 million), whose activist Value Up Fund is a joint venture with manager Yasunori Nakagami. After climbing 10 percent in 2009, the $100 million fund was up 8 percent this year through late May. Nakagami says part of Value Up’s strategy is to exploit arbitrage opportunities in smaller Japanese companies by introducing modern management techniques. The fund fills a void in the Japanese stock market, where herding and short-term thinking are the norm, Nakagami asserts: “Those small to medium caps need to be supported by responsible long-term investors, but there are few long-term investors in our capital markets.”

Like Bayview and Sparx, Asuka — which also manages long-short equity, multistrategy and commodities funds — is looking to China. Vice president Kentaro Nakata says the Value Up Fund likes Japanese businesses with potential to profit from China’s extraordinary growth: “If you have expertise in transforming these Japanese companies into more regional plays, then it proves to be rewarding.”

According to HFR, equity hedging accounts for almost 72 percent of hedge fund investing in Asia. Vaulting onto the Asia Hedge Fund 25 at No. 17 is Shanghai-based Greenwoods Asset Management Co., whose long-short Golden China Fund surged 148.4 percent in 2009. Several firms pursued macro and event-driven strategies, with varying success. At Hong Kong’s Lim Advisors (No. 12), the Asia Multi-Strategy and Asia Special Situations funds gained 20 percent and 17.3 percent, respectively. But the Merchant Commodity Fund run by Singapore-based Aisling Analytics (No. 11) was up only 5.2 percent — and fell 14.9 percent in the first three months of this year.

In China the long wait for hedging tools is over now that Beijing has approved the launch of stock index futures, short-selling and margin trading. “It isn’t that far away that we’ll see true hedge funds in the China market — not just trading through Hong Kong,” predicts Lee, who spent eight years working in the fund-of-funds group at Sparx in Hong Kong before joining Blackstone in 2009.

One firm that is excited about this development is Hong Kong’s Pacific Alliance Investment Management (down three places, to No. 10). After sailing through 2008 with a 7.6 percent return, its $1.2 billion Pacific Alliance Asia Opportunity Fund earned 17.6 percent last year. Pacific Alliance co-founder, managing partner and group CIO Chris Gradel, who manages the nimble arbitrage fund, says he aims to capitalize on inefficiencies and dislocations throughout Asia.

For Gradel, who doesn’t care which way markets move, the newly hedged Chinese A-share market is a perfect opportunity. “Once equity futures and short-selling are introduced, a lot of mispricings get arbitraged out,” he says. “As it unfolds, we want to be playing in the early stages of that opportunity set.”

Looking ahead, one of the biggest challenges for Asia’s hedge fund industry is foreign liquidity flows to and from the region. Sail Advisors CEO Duhamel says the redemption problem is compounded by the fact that there aren’t enough big local institutional investors to anchor the Asian market.

“通常他们要么货币boards or currency reserves, or they have a mandate to invest on a global basis, away from their home country,” Duhamel notes.

他认为，在2008年之前，私人银行和其他机构在本应寻找alpha的时候就犯了一个错误，即买入了亚洲的增长故事。杜哈默尔说，欧洲和北美的机构将是下一个投资亚洲对冲基金的国家，但他预计资金要到年底才能开始流动。他补充说：“可能有很多人在谈论，但我们没有看到很多人走路。”。

Blackstone’s Lee says the proliferation of hedging tools and counterparties — combined with maturing ex-Japan markets — will make Asia a force in the global hedge fund industry. But to get there, Asia will need to continue to develop and attract new investment talent. It should help that big multistrategy firms such as New York’s Highbridge Capital Management and Stamford, Connecticut–based SAC Capital Advisors have been in Asia since early last decade.

黑石集团香港基金会的副总裁Michael Garrow说：“这是造就人才、指导人才和孕育新一轮有前途的对冲基金经理的原因。”“我乐观地认为，总体质量水平会有所提高。”

Right now, Value Partners is applying its talent for stock picking to the Chinese property market. Fearing a speculative bubble, Beijing recently took steps to cool down real estate sales. Value Partners’ So says one result was that this spring some big Chinese developers were trading at discounts of 30 to 70 cents on the dollar. On the assumption that money will eventually flow back to property because most Chinese aren’t allowed to invest overseas, Value Partners is waiting for the market to hit bottom later this year. “We are trying to identify long-term winners,” So says.

但随着价值合作伙伴在亚洲寻找价值股，中国政府的重拳出击令人担忧。在许多行业，例如钢铁行业，中国政府可以通过命令工厂提高或降低产量来控制供需。他说，不管一家公司的基本面有多好，这种干预都会影响股价：“它会杀了你，尽管你是一个很好的选股人。”