Kumin’s Folger Hill Hedge Fund Said to Hire First Asia Managers

(Bloomberg) -- Folger Hill Asset Management, the hedge-fund firm led by former SAC Capital Advisors Chief Operating Officer Sol Kumin, hired the first three fund managers for its Asia business, said people with knowledge of the matter.

The firm recruited Nobutaka Ariki, Jinchul Lee and Hillman Wong in Hong Kong, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the information hasn’t been publicly announced. Folger Hill, which oversaw $1 billion at the end of last year, expects the Asia strategy to oversee a few hundred million dollars, said one of the people, who declined to provide additional details.

Folger Hill, which has offices in New York and Boston, is expanding to Asia as a number of global peers add staff in the region, seeking new avenues of growth amid the industry’s struggles to make money and retain investors. Investors pulled $25.2 billion out of the industry in July, the highest monthly redemption since February 2009, according to an eVestment report.

The hiring reunites Ariki, Lee and Wong with former colleague Angus Wai, who is chief executive officer for Asia at Folger Hill. Wai had headed the Asia operations of billionaire-investor Steven A. Cohen’s family office Point72 Asset Management before being tapped earlier this year to build up Folger Hill’s regional business. Wai didn’t return a request seeking comment.

Investor Redemptions

Ariki was most recently with Tokyo-based Asuka Asset Management, according to his LinkedIn profile. Lee earlier this year left PAG, a Hong Kong-based manager of private-equity, real-estate and hedge funds, and Wong left BlueCrest Capital Management’s Hong Kong office in June, according to their license records with the city’s Securities and Futures Commission.

Investor redemption and losses cut Folger Hill’s assets by nearly one-third from its 2015 peak to about $750 million by mid-August, Reuters reported on Aug. 22, citing unidentified people familiar with the matter. Its main fund lost about 5 percent through that date, having recouped some of the losses earlier this year, the report said. It declined 3.2 percent in 2015.

Point72 was created after SAC pleaded guilty in 2013 to securities fraud, agreed to pay a record $1.8 billion fine, returned outside money and converted into a family office.

To contact the reporter on this story: Bei Hu in Hong Kong at bhu5@bloomberg.net. To contact the editors responsible for this story: Sree Vidya Bhaktavatsalam at sbhaktavatsa@bloomberg.net, Peter Vercoe

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