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9 Jan 2007

ExPirate's Launch new Hedge Fund

Two former analysts and a portfolio manager from activist hedge fund Pirate capital have joined a new hedge fund started by another ex-Pirate colleague. Andrew Stotland, a former marketer at Tom Hudson’s Pirate Capital, formed FrontFour Capital Group and launched the event-driven fund at the beginning of the month.

Zachary George and David Lorber, former analysts at Pirate, and Carl Klein, the firm’s former fixed income portfolio manager, have now joined FrontFour Capital Management. The new hedge fund is expected to launch in the coming months. Its seed investment came from Weston-Atlas Partners, a joint venture between London-based alternative asset management firm Atlas capital Group and Weston Capital.

“New York-based FrontFour employs an event-driven strategy, investing across the capital structure, pairing fundamental analysis with the identification of specific catalysts,” Stotland said. He left Pirate Capital in August. He was responsible for raising the majority of the firms assets. George, Lorber and Klein were part of a group of staff members that left Pirate in September. They departed just as Pirate saw its performance fall below its historically high returns and the firm closed its funds to new investors so that it could control its overall growth. They are now principals at the new hedge fund.

Stotland was the last of the four marketers from Pirate to find a new venture after departing the firm last summer. Miguel Triay went to New York-based Argonaut Capital Management, which runs global macro funds. Kerry Baldwin went to Brian Lippey’s Connecticut-based Trigram Capital Management, which runs an Asia fund. Meanwhile, Gregory Teitel went to Florida-based fund of hedge funds Crystal Advisors.

RFA Introduces new Hedge Fund Protection Product

Richard Fleischman & Associates (RFA), the leader in IT solutions for the hedge fund community, today announced the general availability of the eHarbor file and e-mail data backup/restore solution for hedge funds.

"The best way for a hedge fund to protect itself from disaster is to prevent it from happening in the first place. No organization is immune from lost data and the staggering costs in both time and resources involved rebuilding databases and trading history," says Richard Fleischman, president of RFA. "eHarbor is an enterprise-quality storage solution available at an affordable price. This scalable storage solution grows with hedge funds and never becomes out-dated. eHarbor was designed to provide secure, off-site storage with unlimited backup and restore capability which helps clients save money on their IT investment while protecting their most valuable asset - their data."

RFA was stablished in 1990 and headquartered in New York City, Richard Fleischman & Associates currently serves more than 400 hedge funds globally, RFA maintains a world-class data center in Westchester, NY, providing fully equipped office and trading desk space, disaster recovery and business continuity services.

Hedge Fund Manager Hired by L&G

Legal & General, the UK pension fund worth £218 billion, has appointed former hedge fund executive Ian King as head of L&G's active European equities. He was involved in 2006 in establishing KDR Europe, a European equity hedge fund, according to Reuters.

King will hold the post beginning from the end of January, the strategy is to revive its European active equity team after staff exits last year. His move to Legal & General Investment Management bucks a recent trend of managers at traditional asset management firms moving into the fast-growing hedge fund arena.

In a statement L&G said, "His (King's) immediate task will be to rebuild the active European equity team with the intention that the European equity portfolios are returned to active management by the mid-year." Before his work at KDR, L&G said, King worked at American Express Asset Management International for more than 10 years.

Legal & General is one of Britain's top 50 FTSE companies, with over 5.4 million customers L&G employs over 8,800 staff. The company has operations in the USA, France, the Netherlands and Germany, as well as the UK.