The founder of private equity fund is American investor Benjamin Graham (1894- 1976). 1900 or so, some home offices specializing in financial management for the rich began to appear in the United States. Some wealthy families such as phipps, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt and Whitney have invested in many commercial enterprises, including AT & amp； T, Eastern Airlines, McDonald's-Douglas, etc. These families gradually changed from self-management to hiring external professionals to select and manage investments.
1923, Graham, who lost his father at the age of 9 and his mother went bankrupt when investing in the stock market at the age of 0/3, gave up the newberg-Henderson-Lauber Company, which had been a partner for 9 years, and set up a private equity fund with a scale of 500,000 US dollars in Granci. The first stock to be fired was DuPont.
★ Famous Quantum Fund
From 65438 to 0949, Jones'Group, the first real hedge fund in the United States, was established by private placement, which led the trend of private placement of hedge funds. The prestigious Quantum Fund was founded by Soros and Rogers in the United States at the end of 1960.
The initial assets of Quantum Fund are only $4 million. The fund is located in new york, but the investors are all non-American foreign investors, which can avoid the supervision of the SEC. 1979, Soros renamed the company Quantum Company, which originated from Heisenberg's uncertainty law of quantum mechanics. By the end of 1997, the quantum fund has increased to a giant fund with total assets of nearly $6 billion.
On 1997, Quantum Fund suffered the setback of Russian financial turmoil and shorting Hong Kong dollars, and its investment in American Internet stocks made it lose nearly $5 billion, which hurt its vitality greatly. Therefore, on April 28th, 2004, Soros had to announce the closure of this thriving hedge fund.
Hedge fund, also known as hedge fund or arbitrage fund, refers to a financial fund that combines financial derivatives such as financial futures and financial options with financial institutions and obtains profits by means of high-risk speculation. It is a form of investment fund, which belongs to exempt market products. It means "risk hedge fund". Hedge funds are called funds, which are essentially different from mutual funds in terms of security, income and appreciation.
Hedge funds use various trading methods (such as short selling, leverage, program trading, swap trading, arbitrage trading, derivatives, etc. ) to hedge, transpose, hedge, and make huge profits. These concepts have gone beyond the traditional operation scope of preventing risks and ensuring benefits. In addition, the legal threshold for launching and establishing hedge funds is much lower than that of mutual funds, which further increases their risks. In order to protect investors, the securities management agencies in North America classify it as a high-risk investment category, and strictly restrict the participation of ordinary investors. For example, it is stipulated that each hedge fund should have less than 100 investors and the minimum investment is $6,543,800+0 million.
After decades of evolution, hedge funds have lost the original connotation of risk hedging, and the title of hedge funds also exists in name only. Hedge fund has become synonymous with a new investment model, that is, based on the latest investment theory and extremely complex financial market operation skills, making full use of the leverage of various financial derivatives, taking high risks and pursuing high returns.
★KKR and Blackstone
1 May, 9761day, three investment bankers of Bear Stearns, a famous wall street investment bank, kravis and George Roberts formed an investment company KKR( 1987) in partnership with their business mentor Jerome Kohlberg. Starting from $65,438+0,000, it has created a series of classic cases from RJR (Na Beske Company) to SunGard.
1985, in a small office, Su Shimin and Peter G. Peterson founded the Blackstone Group, with only two employees at that time and an account of $400,000. Twenty-two years later, Blackstone Group owns 9.7% of the shares of China National Foreign Exchange Investment Corporation and has become the second largest private equity investment fund in the world. As of May 1 day, 2007, Blackstone managed assets as high as 88.4 billion US dollars.
★ Nobel Prize winners lead LTCM.
LTCM, an American long-term capital management company, is one of the four famous hedge funds in the world. It has two analysts with an ideal portfolio. They are robert merton and Myron Scholes, world-class designers of computer mathematics automatic investment model. They won the 1997 Nobel Prize in Economics because of the option pricing formula. However, LTCM eventually lost to unpredictable small probability events in the future and was on the verge of bankruptcy in the Russian financial storm. The annual return on investment of LTCM in the glorious period is: 65438+28.5% in 0994, 65438+42.8% in 0995, 65438+40.8% in 0996 and 65438+ 17% in 0997.
★D. E. Shaw Company
From 65438 to the early 1980s, David Shaw was a professor at Columbia University until he was hired by Morgan Stanley with a high salary. 1988, he established his own investment company-D.E. Shawco Company, which he called "Computational Hedge Fund". Today, the company manages a fund of $27.3 billion and uses closely tracked computer algorithms to monitor the fluctuation of stock prices in the international market. Shaw is also a scientific adviser to former US President Bill Clinton. Now, it is the fourth largest hedge fund in the United States.
★ President Club
Carlyle investment group in the United States is called "President's Club". George W. Bush, former US President, is the chairman of the Advisory Committee of Carlyle, and john major, former British Prime Minister, is the chairman of Carlyle Europe.
Carlyle currently manages 76 funds, of which * * * manages $97.7 billion. Mainly used for corporate mergers and acquisitions, real estate and venture capital in Asia, Europe and North America. It is reported that since the establishment of 1987, Carlyle Group has made huge profits from the global strategic investment of 125 billion US dollars, with an average annual return rate of 35% for investors.