International Herald Tribune- Now that their teams are out of the Major League Baseball playoffs, the New York Yankees catcher Jorge Posada and the Chicago Cubs outfielder Alfonso Soriano may turntheir attention to a new hedge fund investment.
The star athletes’ financial advisers, the former Merrill Lynch employees Juan Collar and Anthony Fernandez, named them and two other ballplayers as investors in a hedge fund in Miami that the advisers started in March, according to a July 12 private placement notice filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The fund plans to raise as much as $60 million.
“Baseball players are our niche market,” Collar said during an interview. Professional athletes, with their multimillion-dollar salaries, have become investors in the latest financial instruments, along with wealthy software executives and investment bankers.
Jose Contreras, a pitcher for the Chicago White Sox, and Orlando Hernandez, a pitcher for the New York Mets, are listed along with Posada and Soriano as “beneficial owners” of Quantum Hedge Strategies Fund. That means they would have at least a 10 percent stake in the partnership – $6 million each.
