Economist – Hedge fund managers tend to dread deadlines, rather like journalists do. On October 31st John Paulson, a wildly successful hedge-fund manager, faced a deadline for investors to give notice that they are withdrawing money from his hedge fund. After a year of dreadful performance, some were expecting a rush for the exits: one of Mr Paulson’s largest funds was down 47% in the year through September.
But things appear to have turned out rather better than some were predicting. Investors put in requests to withdraw around $2.4 billion, or 8% of the firm’s assets. (But if you consider that half of the hedge fund’s $30 billion are from employees, that means redemptions were actually closer to 16% of redeemable assets.) Still it could have been worse. Other hedge funds have been worried that investors would flee Mr Paulson, and have been closely monitoring positions in the stocks his hedge fund owns, in case he had to sell them to meet redemption requests.
