Massachusetts pension fund hires hedge funds Contrarian, IPM

By Svea Herbst-Bayliss

BOSTON (Reuters) - The Massachusetts state pension fund hired hedge funds for the second time this year on Wednesday, adding Contrarian Capital and IPM Informed Portfolio Management to its roster of managers.

Trustees for the $60 billion fund voted at a board meeting to put up to $200 million each with Greenwich, Connecticut-based Contrarian Capital Management and Stockholm-based IPM Informed Portfolio Management AB.

The pension fund invests roughly $5.1 billion in roughly two dozen hedge funds including Brevan Howard, Och-Ziff Capital Management, King Street Capital Management and Glenview Capital among others.

Contrarian oversees $3 billion in assets. The Massachusetts pension fund is investing in its Contrarian Capital Management Emerging Markets Strategy, which is managed by Xiao Song and seeks to find stressed, distressed and defaulted corporate and sovereign debt. Contrarian has offices in London, Paris, Sao Paulo and Hong Kong and its team speaks Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, French, German and Italian, something the pension fund feels is critical to finding deals and understanding foreign legal structures.

IPM oversees a total of $5.1 billion in assets, and the Massachusetts fund is investing in its IPM Systematic Macro Strategy, which has become so popular in the last two years that assets more than doubled in size to $1.8 billion. The strategy seeks to make money on the divergences between fundamentals and market prices with proprietary computer models.

The state is making the hedge fund investments at a time many public pensions are considering exiting the sector, following a period of lackluster returns at many funds and growing political concerns about hedge funds' high fees.

Massachusetts, which invests roughly 8.4 percent of its assets in hedge funds and has some of the largest hedge fund allocations of any public pension fund in the United States, has long pushed for fee cuts at expensive hedge funds. It will soon have some $2 billion invested through managed accounts.

The money going into Contrarian and IPM will be in managed accounts, more custom-tailored structures that often involve lower fees and more transparency.

The vote to put money into Contrarian and IPM comes only a few months after trustees voted in February to put $150 million each with New York-based SECOR and London-based East Lodge Capital.

The fund is also reviewing whether it may want to eventually manage some of its investments internally, something a number of large public plans are now doing to cut fees as well as attract investment talent.

(Reporting by Svea Herbst-Bayliss; Editing by Dan Grebler and Tom Brown)

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