BlueCrest Capital Management, once Europe’s third biggest hedge fund firm, is to stop managing money for outside clients after a sharp drop in assets and weak returns from its flagship macro fund.
The firm’s flagship USD2.5 billion hedge fund, BlueCrest Capital International will be shut next year as part of the move announced this week.
BlueCrest Capital Management was founded by William Reeves and Michael Platt in 2000. The Jersey (Channel Islands)-based company has registered offices in London, New York, Boston, Geneva, Connecticut and Singapore. Forbes estimated Platt's net worth to be USD 3.5 billion in 2015.
In 2014, Bluecrest spun off USD8.2 billion worth of assets into a new company, Systematica Investments, run by Bluecrest employee, Leda Braga. Last month, BlueCrest agreed to sell the majority of its stake in Systematica.
BlueCrest, which oversaw around USD36 billion at its peak in 2012 but now manages USD8 billion in a range of funds, including equity, credit and emerging-market portfolios, said in a letter to investors it would become a private investment partnership managing “several” billion dollars in assets.
According to an interview with The Wall Street Journal, co-founder Mike Platt, whose own stake will now make up a large proportion of the firm’s assets, said that risk-taking had been increasingly limited by institutional investors’ demands for safer products, noting: “We want to run [the fund] more like the industry was run 20 years ago. Risk levels will be increased.”
