Man Chief Predicts Soaring Hedge Fund Closures

Date: Thursday, November 22, 2007
Author: FINalternatives

When the dust from the credit crisis clears, Peter Clarke expects to see an awful lot of casualties.

The Man Group CEO says he expects more than 10% of hedge funds will have gone out of business by the new year; for every high-profile disaster, there is plenty of “quiet withering” going on. Worse, he told the Financial Times, the credit crunch has also put the brakes on new hedge fund launches, which are down by a third.

“Historically, the hedge fund world has seen somewhere between a 5, 6, 7 percent attrition rate in terms of funds closing or ceasing business; I would expect to see that, and this is a pure guess of course, maybe reaching twice that,” Clarke told the FT.

Clarke says his firm, the world’s largest listed hedge fund manager, is concerned about the decrease in launches.

“To some extent [the slowdown] is bad news for us because clearly we like to have an inventory of people to allocate money to,” he said.