By Margot Patrick
Of DOW JONES NEWSWIRES
LONDON -(Dow Jones)- In the latest sign that investors are moving back into hedge funds, London-based RWC Partners said Thursday it has received nearly $500 million in capital and commitments for a strategy investing in large-cap U.S. stocks that will be run by recent hire Mike Corcell.
Corcell, who previously picked stocks for U.S. hedge fund firm SAC Capital and the U.K.'s Threadneedle Asset Management, will lead a team of five managing the strategy, which is being offered in a Luxembourg onshore fund called RWC U.S. Absolute Alpha and a Cayman Islands vehicle called RWC Biltmore fund.
The investors in the strategy include Corcell's former employer, SAC Capital, for which he worked in London about six months last year. Corcell was at Threadneedle for five years before that, running its American Crescendo fund.
He joined RWC Partners in June.
While hedge funds have been slowly rebuilding their asset bases after a painful 2008 that wiped hundreds of billions of dollars from the industry in redemptions and performance losses, there has been less than a handful of sizeable new launches this year in Europe.
What constitutes a big launch has also changed dramatically: $500 million is now considered impressive, where $1 billion was previously a watermark of note.
The RWC fund-raising reflects other changes afoot in the industry. More than $100 million of the money is going into the Luxembourg version of the fund, which is a Ucits III fund, meaning it complies with European rules on transparency, valuation and risk and can be marketed to individuals across the European Union. Ucits stands for "undertakings for collective investments in transferable securities."
Other hedge fund groups, including Man Group PLC (EMG.LN), GLG Partners Inc. (GLG) and Brevan Howard Asset Management LLP, have rolled out these kinds of funds in recent months to appeal to investors who want more transparency and the comfort of onshore oversight.
"We believe we have managed to develop a structure which meets the needs of all investors, in widely different jurisdictions. Transparency and liquidity were critical in addressing the market need," said Dan Mannix, head of sales at RWC Partners.
RWC already has about $2 billion in other Ucits funds it runs, of $3.5 billion in total assets under management.
Corcell's team on the strategy has another SAC veteran, Gabe Marshank; Alex Roberts, who worked for Threadneedle; Sam Weeman, formerly of JPMorgan; and trader Hayes Varey, who most recently worked for investment bank Simmons & Co. International Ltd.
The new strategy will invest in large-cap U.S. stocks, taking both long and short positions.
Company Web site: http://www.rwcpartners.com
--By Margot Patrick, Dow Jones Newswires; +44 (0)20 7842 9451; margot.patrick@dowjones.com