John Taylor Vows Return to Currency Management After Bankruptcy of FX Concepts, Once the World’s Biggest Currency Fund

January 12, 2014 Leave a comment

John Taylor Vows Return to Currency Management After Bankruptcy

John Taylor, the founder of what was once the world’s biggest currency hedge fund, said he plans re-enter the foreign-exchange asset-management business again one day in the wake of the bankruptcy of FX Concepts LLC.“We are writing our weekly newsletter and have lots of prospects,” Taylor said in a telephone interview today from New York. “We expect in the future to be bigger and better. I’m very glad to be back to doing research and writing. I suspect in the future we’ll be managing money again.”

Taylor, 70, has been involved in the foreign-exchange markets for more than three decades and is chief executive of New York-based FX Concepts, which peaked at about $14 billion in assets in 2007. The newsletter will be the firm’s primary focus, Taylor wrote in a note to clients today, as reported earlier by Reuters. All the firm’s assets, besides the newsletter and the research utilized in producing it, were sold as part of the Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings that began three months ago.

“We are presently negotiating with the banks working to close down the debts of the company,” Taylor said in the phone interview. “I can see this coming to an end relatively soon. We are servicing the clients that we have for now.”

The hedge fund’s assets under management shrank to $661 million as of Sept. 26, from about $12 billion in 2009, according to data from the company’s investor website. The San Francisco Employees’ Retirement System voted on Sept. 11 to pull the more-than $450 million it had invested with FX Concepts.

Volatility in the $5.3 trillion-a-day foreign-exchange market rose in the first half of last year at the fastest pace since Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. collapsed in 2008, catching traders off guard and wiping out gains from many currency funds.

FX Concepts’ Global Currency Program had lost 13.9 percent in 2013 as of August, according to a company report. The firm, which was founded in 1981 by Taylor, saw its Global Currency Program lose 3.11 percent in 2012 and 14.47 percent in 2011.

To contact the reporter on this story: Liz Capo McCormick in New York at emccormick7@bloomberg.net

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