Manulife Financial (MFC) to Acquire CQS streetinsider.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from streetinsider.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
The Rich Lister has sold his $20 billion asset manager to Manulife Investment Management, but will keep his flagship fund as the kernel of a new venture.
For a man whose flagship hedge fund was down more than 50 percent at one point last year, Michael Hintze sounds surprisingly upbeat.
On a chilly winter afternoon, Hintze, 67, phones from London to talk about his firm’s reckoning this past spring, a time when the flagship fund’s structured credit instruments went terribly wrong and the firm’s positioning amid market turmoil sent that and one other fund plummeting to their worst-ever losses wiping out billions of assets in mere weeks.
It was an exceedingly rare stumble for CQS, a London-based hedge fund that had reliably minted money for investors more or less uninterrupted since its founding in 1999. Its flagship Directional Opportunities Fund had averaged gains of nearly 14 percent per year since its inception in 2005.