BBC News- The upmarket district in the West End of London is home to many of the financial speculators who have made a mint out of the mortgage bank’s woes.<\/p>\n
Hedge funds – as well as traders in some of the big City investment banks – have been betting heavily for months that Northern Rock was facing serious funding problems and its shares were on their way south.<\/p>\n
Their concerns proved well founded.<\/p>\n
The collapse in Northern Rock’s share-price has been spectacular since the BBC revealed that the Newcastle-based lender had applied to the Bank of England for emergency funding.<\/p>\n
At 195p by Friday afternoon, they were changing hands for less than a third of the price that they were a little over a week ago, and well below the \u00c3\u201a\u00c2\u00a312.58 they fetched in February.<\/p>\n
Hedge funds deploy a wider range of investment strategies across a broader range of markets – from currencies to commodities to shares – than traditional long-only fund managers in the pursuit of generous returns, even in declining market.<\/p>\n