The operative word in the title's BSD is "Swinging" as the fund swung from -20.3% in 2011 to +24.1% in the first 10 months of 2012.
From Bloomberg:
Harry Borden/Contour by Getty Images
Odey's flagship $1.8 billion Odey European Inc. fund returned 24.1
percent in the first 10 months of 2012, making it No. 2 in the Bloomberg
Markets ranking of the best-performing hedge funds in Europe and No. 5
globally.
Crispin Odey is fumbling around a storage room in a Georgian town house in London’s Mayfair district, home to Odey Asset Management LLP, his $7 billion hedge-fund firm.
Clattering through old computers, boxes of books and forgotten oil paintings that lent a genteel air to his offices, he’s fishing for the book that shows he was one of the earliest investors to spot the financial crisis, Bloomberg Markets will report in its February issue.
Odey emerges from the room brandishing “Crunch Time for Credit?,” a 250-page report he commissioned and had published in 2005 charting the emergence of a credit bubble and predicting a market collapse.
“See how terrible we are!” Odey says with undisguised sarcasm. “We were too early!”
In his suspenders and pinstriped suit, Odey, 53, hardly looks like a renegade investor. Yet in 20 years of managing his hedge fund, Odey has stood out for contrarian bets that produced outsize gains.
His flagship $1.8 billion Odey European Inc. fund returned 24.1 percent in the first 10 months of 2012, making it No. 2 in the Bloomberg Markets ranking of the best-performing hedge funds in Europe and No. 5 globally.
Odey has chalked up spectacular losses, too. His 2012 gains are a stark change from the year before, when his fund was down 20.3 percent after wrong-way bets on British banking stocks such as Barclays Plc and on British Sky Broadcasting Group Plc (BSY), the U.K. broadcaster partly owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.
‘Rarely Wrong’
“I am very playful,” he says, scribbling in a Moleskine notebook that rests on a mahogany table befitting his family pedigree. “I needed to show my clients that it’s not the volatility that’s important. It’s the returns.”
Odey’s flagship fund made compound annual gross returns of 13.5 percent from its inception in 1992 to Oct. 31. With more than $180 million of his own money invested in the fund, Odey isn’t content with grinding out single-digit, low-risk returns that often pacify pension funds and other institutional clients.See also:
Instead, he makes bets to maximize gains. “His views may be off in timing, but they are rarely wrong from a fundamental perspective,” says Mattia Nocera, managing director of London- based Belgrave Capital Management Ltd., a unit of private bank Banca del Ceresio SA, which has invested in Odey since the beginning and had $100 million in his funds as of the end of November....MORE
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And a fine tomb it is.*...MORE
I saw the story yesterday under the FT Alphaville headline "Crispin Odeyous".
It wasn't until I saw the DealBreaker link to the Telegraph that I realized what a pig this guy is:
UK Hedge Fund Manager Sets Unreachably High Bar With Resplendent Private Residence For Chicken Friends
…Odey has upped the ante for poultry accommodation – he’s building a temple for his chickens for which the stone alone costs £130,000. The Palladian-style chicken house, designed by Christopher Smallwood Architects, has won planning approval from the Forest of Dean District Council......(For those who can appreciate the news without worrying about what it’s going to cost them, here’s a blueprint of the chicken mansion, courtesy of FT Alphaville):
Yesterday:
The World's Most Profitable Hedge Fund
