MPI Research Corner

by Daniel Li and Alexandre Dussaucy By the end of September, John Paulson’s two flagship funds, the Paulson Advantage and the leveraged Advantage Plus fund, have lost 32% and 45%, respectively, for the year. As these losses loom large, many analyses and commentaries are trying to explain what went wrong. These reports, such as the [...]

An October 15th WSJ article, “When ‘Focused’ Funds Falter”, finds many prominent stock-picker funds among some of the worst performing this year. Of such funds, Fairholme Fund (-27.6% YTD through Oct 13), a subject of one of our previous blog posts, is one of the most notable – along with Bill Miller’s Legg Mason Opportunity [...]

Bruce Berkowitz’s fund has gotten a lot of media attention lately. Investors point to significant financial sector exposure and investments in AIG, BofA, Citi and St. Joe stock in particular as a drag on the fund’s 2011 results. While admitting on the conference call that the fund’s performance this year was “horrible” and the health [...]

Equity Europe funds’ performances range from -29.7% to 10.84% over the last 52 weeks (ending September 30, 2011), in EUR terms. On average, the best 5% of the funds outperform the market (pegged to the MSCI Europe Index) by approximately 9.67% and the worst 5% underperform by approximately 11.3%. We last analyzed this asset class [...]