Narula Masters Fed, Beats Funds With 500% Gain: Mortgages
Deepak Narula hit bottom in 2007 when investors pulled cash from his hedge fund, leaving him to unwind mortgage bond bets in a frozen market that would have made money if he’d just held on a few more months.
Five years later, Narula, 49, is at the top of the best- performing category of funds. Metacapital Management LP, the New York-based firm he founded in 2001 after leaving Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., is up 34 percent this year, almost 10 times the industry average. Since restarting in July 2008, returns exceed 500 percent and the firm has expanded to oversee $1.4 billion.
“Mortgage funds generally are doing fabulously well, but he’s outperforming everyone,” said Rael Gorelick, co-founder and principal of Charlotte, North Carolina-based Gorelick Brothers Capital LLC, a $250 million fund of mortgage hedge funds invested in 20 managers. He’s “creative, smart, experienced and can play with two hands: This is his time.”
Narula has built his recent run on predicting how the Federal Reserve, the Obama administration and financial industry would react to the worst housing crash since the 1930s. He’s outpacing competitors by investing in both government-backed securities and riskier property debt, profiting from buying bonds that rallied as real estate recovered, and trading around government attempts to stoke refinancing....MUCH MORE
