The past six months have been a hard time for some high-profile hedge funds. Crispin Odey’s Swan Fund and Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square have made losses of sufficient magnitude to wipe out years of accrued profits. Other star funds, from Blackstone’s Senfina to Paulson & Co, have also seen the second quarter of this year turn into a bloodbath.
Some of the losses are attributable to the normal things that go wrong in investing — mergers which fall apart, commodity prices following their own logic and so on. But some of the worst pain has been caused by trades which looked like they made a lot of sense at the time. Pershing Square’s losses, for example, are largely attributable to one stock — Valeant
— and one macro theme: short China.