Bloomberg – Hedge fund managers, after enduring the industry’s worst month in a decade, are seeking to explain to investors what went wrong and what they are doing about it.
“We clearly underestimated several things, most importantly the tsunami of redemptions that are being delivered to hedge funds as investors line up to get out of these funds as well as record outflows from equity mutual funds,” Jeffrey Gendell, who runs Greenwich, Connecticut-based Tontine Associates LLC, wrote in an Oct. 1 letter to clients.
“I am not a nervous person by nature, but should have been under the circumstances,” wrote Gendell, whose Tontine Partners LP fund plunged 59 percent in September, leaving it down 67 percent for the year, according to investors. Gendell, 49, had expected shares of steel, engineering, airline and chemical companies to appreciate because of falling oil prices. Instead they plummeted.