Alexander Kinmont, the equity
strategist who wrote “The Irrelevance of Japan” report in
2002, is planning to start a hedge fund focused on the country
after leaving Morgan Stanley MUFG Securities Co. in July.
Kinmont, formerly a managing director of Japan equity
strategy at Morgan Stanley MUFG in Tokyo, is heading Tokyo-based
Milestone Asset Management Co., he said. The company currently
offers a long-only fund and is planning to start a long-short
hedge fund later this month to profit from rising and falling
stock prices, he said, declining to elaborate further because it
is still being planned.
“We’re starting the fund now because Japan is cheap for
the first time in a generation,” Kinmont, 47, said in a
telephone interview today. “The fund-raising environment is
extremely difficult, but experience shows when it’s difficult to
raise money, it’s usually the case that capital can be invested
at attractive returns.”
Kinmont characterized Japan as unimportant for investors
“except as a laboratory experiment concerning deflation” in
the December 2002 report he wrote while employed by Nikko
Citigroup Ltd. He reversed that view in April 2009 with a report
for Morgan Stanley entitled “The Relevance of Japan,” saying
the easing of fiscal and monetary policy might boost earnings by
ending deflation.
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