Bloomberg – Dow Kim, the former head of trading and investment banking at Merrill Lynch & Co., dropped plans to start a hedge fund after investors backed out, according to two people with knowledge of the matter.
Kim had been in discussions with institutions that had agreed to invest about $1 billion combined in his Diamond Lake Investment Group LP, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the talks were private. The New York-based firm had hired 30 people based on the commitments.
The evaporation of credit and declines surpassing 20 percent in some stock markets caused the initial investors to change their minds, said the people. Kim had planned a multistrategy hedge fund that would trade everything from equities to bonds to currencies.
