Neptune’s US Opportunities fund has been top of the IMA North America sector in the three and five-year cumulative league tables since Felix Wintle took over in early 2005, with cumulative returns of 51.9% and 77.5% respectively. More unusually, it has also outperformed the peer group average in each discrete year.
Few fund groups can boast this kind of consistency, and Neptune claims market and sector timing is part of its secret.
The house has a top-down research process that attaches much importance to macroeconomic and sector bets, which proved highly profitable during the financial crisis.

A billion-dollar battle between American and Delta to secure a capital alliance with Japan Airlines has fizzled out as Asia’s biggest carrier is on a “countdown to bankruptcy”.
Government insiders in Tokyo said that it had become clear within the past few days that restructuring JAL for survival would probably happen with the airline under administration. Until that happens, and new management is in place, rival carriers will not be invited to take large stakes in JAL.
Officials describe a scramble to maintain business as usual at JAL as creditors and the Government discusses the troubled company’s future. Bankruptcy contingency plans are understood to stretch to co-opting the Japanese diplomatic corps to man the phones at understaffed JAL offices worldwide. Embassies may also be used to soothe local suppliers that have payment concerns.
JAL’s future is being settled amid a maelstrom of competing interest group. A state-backed turnaround group is investigating how the restructuring should be handled and is debating how much funding should come from the state purse. Some ruling-party MPs have said that they favor liquidation. A trio of private sector creditors is keen to avoid that outcome.
It emerged that the Enterprise Turnaround Initiative Corporation had tapped Kazuo Inamori, the founder of the Kyocera electronics group, as a possible transition president. Despite his advanced years, Mr. Inamori is seen as the sort of no-nonsense decision-maker required to shake JAL out of its malaise. He is also known to be close to the ruling Democratic Party of Japan.
Government insiders said that JAL, which is projected to face a capital deficiency of Y88 billion by March, was no longer inviting injections of capital from either of the competing American carriers as any resulting equity stakes would complicate the increasingly likely liquidation of JAL.
The US rivals will, however, be able to continue negotiations over partnerships. Both carriers are expected to shift their pitches from financial enticements to the “strategic logic” of their respective offers.
Since last autumn, Delta Air Lines and American Airlines have been courting JAL, with both companies making similar-sized offers of capital and debt relief. American, which is partnered with JAL through the Oneworld group, is eager to keep JAL in the alliance and exploit its extensive Asian route network. Delta is keen to lure JAL to the Sky Team alliance.
JAL insiders said that negotiations had been suspended until ETIC was satisfied that JAL was in a substantially less precarious financial position. The sudden freeze-out for Delta and American came as both groups were preparing to sweeten their offers.
ETIC’s plans involve pouring about Y300 billion of new capital into JAL. That, however, is dependent upon JAL’s creditors agreeing to a joint debt waiver worth Y350 billion and the company filing for bankruptcy.
ETIC has been at pains to ensure that, if JAL does go down the bankruptcy route, the effect on its operations will not be too disruptive. It has said it will make sure that fuel and spare parts suppliers are paid in full in the event of liquidation. The turnaround group has raised concerns that many of JAL’s suppliers around the world may start to demand cash payments for the supply of goods and services if JAL declares bankruptcy.

There used to be little to argue about in the prime brokerage market. So much so that hedge fund managers tended to grade their brokers based on the quality of biscuit they served in their meeting rooms.
The point was that it did not really matter who had the best biscuit: Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley were the dominant players in prime brokerage and were the firms the average hedge fund manager sought access to.
In 2007, the two shared more than half of all business in the prime brokerage market. Convulsed by the collapse of Lehman Brothers, however, prime brokerage has once again become an open playing field.
According to a survey conducted by the Tabb Group at the end of the year, close to 40% of the hedge fund industry considered changing their principal prime broker in 2009, with a high proportion doing so.
At the beginning of the year, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley were invariably named as the two with the most to lose in the coming months. Indeed, in the darkest days of September and October 2008, both companies had come close to shuttering their prime brokerage operations altogether, fighting as they were for their survival. And in Global Custodian’s annual prime brokerage survey, released during the summer, Goldman saw its ranking slip one place down to seventh, with a score of 5.52, while Morgan Stanley languished in eighth place.
Both firms have lost their luster as a result of their intractable and often brusque handling of clients in the first few months of the year. The damage was done to Morgan Stanley’s reputation by the company’s chief executive, John Mack, making an inopportune attack on short-selling in September 2008. Such gripes have not been enough to pull clients decisively away, however.
While a prime brokerage account with Goldman or Morgan no longer carries quite the same cachet, many hedge funds say both firms’ experience and technological edge remain unparalleled. In addition, the second-tier prime brokerage houses such as Credit Suisse, Deutsche, Citi and JPMorgan, which have topped the Global Custodian league for two years running, have gained mainly from the demise of Lehman and Bear Stearns, rather than the decline of Goldman and Morgan.
What marked 2009 out was the relative ease with which movements of clients between prime brokers was accomplished. The industry has skirted around wide-spread upheavals and has instead seen most clients settle with new principal prime brokers or else easily diversify the range they use.
Credit Suisse has been one of the biggest beneficiaries in 2009. The bank has used the past 12 months to consolidate an already positive reputation. Credit Suisse has benefited not least thanks to an extremely prescient decision early in the year to bulk up its capital introductions team at a time when banks elsewhere were downsizing theirs. As a result, Credit Suisse has been prime broker to 18 launches in 2009 in Europe alone.
As hedge funds emerge from months of painful redemptions, 2010 looks set to be a good year for the bank too.

Internet marketing can be highly effective for all kinds of business. It can help deliver True Local as well as Global Results for a business and the target customers in many different ways, which allow the potential customers to connect up to a business easily when they are ready to make a buying decision.
Listing on Business Directory is one of the most cost effective solutions to bring more customers to different businesses, ranging from bakeries to electronics, from lawn care to professional services and from small businesses to National Accounts. It refers to a concept to communicate various businesses around the world in a single place. This approach can make the website of a business more search engine friendly. It can help put a business on the front page of leading search engines including Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL and Ask.
These days, there are a lot of business directories on Internet, listing the top businesses in thousands of categories for the United States. There are many websites that provide you such facility for free or charging you affordable money. With some service, business owners can even keep track of the market via using the news alerts given by the business directory.

The US mutual fund industry is keeping close tabs on the progress of more than 20 lawsuits that allege companies such as Wal-Mart, Lockheed Martin and Boeing breached their fiduciary duties to employees by choosing funds with unreasonable fees for their retirement plans.
The plaintiffs generally claim their employers caused the retirement plans to pay too much for retail mutual funds and failed to take advantage of the large size of their plans to select institutional funds with much lower fees. At the heart of the cases is the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, the 1974 law that establishes minimum standards for managing pension plans.
The cases may be affecting the investment options that companies choose for their retirement plans, a big source of revenue for many fund groups. The lawsuits, many of which make additional claims of revenue-sharing or other conflicts of interest, may also be leading companies to push for lower fees and greater clarity regarding fee arrangements from the fund managers and service providers that run the retirement plans. Such plans are also known as 401 plans, drawing their name from a section of the Internal Revenue Code.
Most of the cases were filed in 2006 and are just now percolating to the top levels of the legal system. Plaintiffs in a lawsuit brought against farm equipment manufacturer Deere & Co petitioned the Supreme Court for review in November, following a federal appeals court’s dismissal of the case earlier in 2009.
Each year, American employees lose hundreds of millions of dollars due to imprudent selection of investment options with unnecessary fees. But in its February decision to dismiss the Deere case, the appeals court ruled that nothing in the law requires every fiduciary to scour the market to find and offer the cheapest possible fund.
While many of the cases don’t name as defendants the investments firms managing retirement plan assets, some do. The first of the 401 lawsuits to make it to trial claims the Swiss engineering group ABB Inc and two units of Fidelity Investments are fiduciaries of ABB’s employee retirement plans and therefore defendants. Fidelity is arguing that it is not a fiduciary to the plan, according to court documents.
The manufacturer of construction and mining equipment also agreed to no longer include retail funds as core investment options for a two-year period. The settlement would also require Caterpillar to put out requests for proposal if service contracts come up for renewal.
Companies are trying to protect themselves against these lawsuits by increasing disclosure of fees and potential conflicts of interest, as well as gaining greater clarity regarding retirement plan products and services. New lawsuits of this kind may not taper off, however. If more of the 401 excessive-fee cases are decided in plaintiffs’ favor, as with recent decisions involving Wal-Mart and Kraft Foods Global, then larger, more prominent law firms may start filing similar lawsuits against companies.
The department of Labor is expected to finalize guidance this year for plan sponsors on additional disclosure requirements to be made to 401 participants, which could stem future litigation.