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From the 4th Quarter, 2010 issue of Barclay Managed Funds Report. The full report also includes 24 hedge fund and managed futures performance ranking tables and in-depth manager profiles. Subscribe. View Roundtables from back issues.

Take a healthy dose of government stimulus, corporate balance sheet deleveraging, and a revived trend of corporate profit growth, and before long corporations find themselves flush with cash. Add to that a hoard of cash that is sitting idly in private equity funds and increasing interest from sovereign wealth funds in corporate acquisitions. Put it all together and you may very well have the necessary conditions in place for a merger wave.

So far in 2010 corporations have been putting cash to good work by increasing dividends, repurchasing stock, improving technology, and restocking inventory. No mode of cash utilization, however, has been as intriguing and buzzed about by Wall Street and Main Street more than the increased trend in merger and acquisition activity in 2010. Mergermarket reports that global M&A activity for the first three quarters of 2010 totaled $1.4 trillion, up 25% from the same period in 2009. And according to The Economist, global M&A grew by 40% and 43% in the first two years of recovery after the 2000-01 recession.

This phenomenon has not gone unnoticed by the hedge fund community. Multi-strategy and event-driven managers have increased their activity in the space while a flurry of new funds has also launched to capitalize on the opportunity set. In order to discuss the recent trends in M&A activity and explore the investment landscape for merger arbitrageurs, we’ve assembled a panel of expert practitioners in the field.

Our panelists are:

Drew Figdor, TIG Advisors, LLC.
Jeff O'Brien, Highland Capital Management.
Jonathan Spitzer, First Eagle Investment Management, LLC.

The complete article will be available on the BarclayHedge.com website in February2011. Subscribe to receive each issue of the Barclay Managed Funds Report as it comes out.

Labels: Barclay Managed Funds Report, Barclay Roundtable, long short equity

# posted by BarclayHedge @ 3:17 PM