$700 Million Hedge Fund Closes Most Of Its Positions

In a time when underperforming hedge funds – that would be most of them  – are doubling down in hopes of undoing recent losses and catching up to the S&P, and avoiding a flood of redemption requests, one fund decided to take money off the table.

Rhicon Currency Management – a $700 million FX-focused hedge fund – closed out most of its positions roughly three weeks ago, according to managing director Peter Jacobson. The fund’s intra-month strategy is “completely flat,” while roughly half of the money in its one-week-or-less book is invested, Bloomberg reports.

Why? One simple reason: according to Jacobson, “nothing looks compelling”.

The refreshing honesty from the hedge fund manager, who unlike his peers does not try to justify his fees by being invested at all times, comes amid recent turmoil in the US stock markets which however has failed to inspire volatility in the $5.1 trillion-a-day foreign exchange market, making life for traders especially difficult. With the “risk off” Yen refusing to act as a “risk off” currency – that honor has now been handed over to the Chinese Yuan, however good luck shorting it with the PBOC occasionally pushing overnight rates to a level that destroys all shorts – and the euro sliding as European growth has slowed to a crawl, Jacobson is steering clear. As for the US dollar, Rhicon believes won’t take another leg higher unless benchmark 10-year Treasury yields spike to 3.3 or 3.4%.

Jacobson said the firm doesn’t often completely shut down its positions. However, in recent years it’s become a more frequent occurrence as extraordinary monetary stimulus on the part of global central banks compressed volatility, not to mention made a mockery of fundamentals-based trading.

“Not trading is actually a trade decision”, said Jacobson. “I don’t see anything that makes sense to me, so there’s absolutely no reason why I should have positions on”.