AsianInvesterAsianInvester
Advertisement

Thaddeus Capital catches Spratt

Lehman analyst Nick Spratt joins the hedge fund to focus on event-driven opportunities in Japan.
Thaddeus Capital catches Spratt
Lehman analyst Nick Spratt joins the hedge fund to focus on event-driven opportunities in Japan.

Nick Spratt has joined Hong Kong-based hedge fund Thaddeus Capital as a senior analyst. He will focus on Japan non-financials and regional media and entertainment at the new event-driven fund.

He will be joining hedge fund veterans Charle Peza and Paul Sheehan who launched the fund on 1 June, having previously been co-founders of HDH Advisers and John Locke Capital respectively. Spratt will tackle Japanese corporations while the teamÆs bank expert and former Federal Reserve examiner Sheehan will continue to handle the Japanese bank portfolio.

Spratt joins a team of five analysts at Thaddeus, including another recent arrival Kevin Chan who joined earlier from Credit Suisse. He had been head of an Asian proprietary trading desk in London; before that he was in derivatives research at Citigroup and ran quant/hedge research at ING

Thaddeus says it remains conservative about the event-driven outlook in Japan, sensing that activism as a theme there is still unproven. Despite all the chatter about private equity in Japan, their spokesperson poses the rhetorical question: ôItÆs a potential catalyst, sure, but where are all the private equity deals in Japan?ö

So, they are looking closely at M&A, restructurings, spin offs, and spotlighted the retail and pharmaceuticals sectors as areas of possible event driven activity in Japan.

Spratt had previously been working as a senior vice president at Lehman Brothers in Tokyo covering Japanese media and software companies. Before then he had spent two years in the firmÆs celebrated Hong Kong team for media, telecom and technology research; back in those dizzying millennial days in which Lehman Brothers used to style itself as AsiaÆs æinternet bank of choiceÆ and brokersÆ internet stock price targets were based on a multiple to page hits.

¬ Haymarket Media Limited. All rights reserved.
Advertisement