Hedge Funds: The Protean Survivalists: Of shareholder activism and other investment strategies

Master's Thesis from the year 2006 in the subject Business economics - Law, grade: A- (German: Sehr Gut 1,5), University of Frankfurt (Main) (The Institute for Law and Finance), course: LL.M. (Finance), language: English, abstract: This paper investigates ¿activist investing¿ as adopted by some institutional investors and hedge funds, and explores the resulting impact on the decision-making and corporate governance processes of the companies in which they invest. Firstly, it suggests that although activist investing has become something of a fad and its benefit to firm performance is still disputed, investors¿ attitudes have changed and acceptance of the strategy is growing. Secondly, it posits that hedge funds, in keeping with their respective financial size and available resources will continue to apply this strategy with three key objectives in mind, namely: (i) To unlock value for short-term profit gains; (ii) To support a quasi-long-only medium-term (circa. 7 years) investment diversification strategy; (iii) To acquire businesses for the building of conglomerate industrial groups of companies, i.e. forging ¿King Cong¿ funds. For a more thorough introduction to hedge funds in general, readers are invited to read my earlier study titled:"The Challenge of reigning-in Hedge Funds through Regulation and the Need to improve Disclosure Requirements". the latter looks at: 1. Lack of transparency as a key feature of hedge fund investment 2. Benchmarking and Performance Measurement error 3. Risk management challenge presented by investing in hedge funds 4. Management Fees and their relation to performance and risk 5. Index funds & Fund of funds and their diversification advantages over hedge funds and other key topics