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Saturday, February 18, 2012

Hedge fund’s co-founder is all business about his religious beliefs

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Hedge fund’s co-founder is all business about his religious beliefs

Text SizePrintE-mailReprints By Jesse Westbrook and Chanyaporn Chanjaroen,

On a drizzly morning, Michael Farmer stepped to the pulpit to deliver a stern message to fellow parishioners at St. Helen’s Bishopsgate, an 800-year-old church in the shadow of the London Metal Exchange and in the heart of the City, London’s financial district.

“We live in a cursed world — cursed by God,” Farmer told the men and women who fill the church, most of them workers in the financial industry. “We live in a broken society; we have broken nations. Look at the euro zone. Life is a struggle and, in the end, is death.”

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(Daniel Stier/VIA BLOOMBERG) - Michael Farmer, Red Kite Capital co-founder and Conservative Evangelical, in his London office in December.

Yet, Farmer said, Jesus will provide salvation from the daily hardships of disease and poverty — and the firings that have left thousands of City workers unemployed, he preaches.

Farmer, 67, is a Conservative Evangelical. He also runs London-based RK Capital Management, a metals-trading hedge fund firm with $1.3 billion of assets under management. Its $400 million Red Kite Compass Fund tops Bloomberg Markets’s ranking of mid-size hedge funds for the first 10 months of 2011, with a return of 47 percent, investors said.

The $200 million Red Kite Metals Fund rose 34 percent, and the $100 million Red Kite Prospect Fund surged 50 percent, clients said.

RK Capital specializes in the buying and selling of copper and prospered by betting that the price of the red metal would fall in 2011 as the pace of construction in China slowed, investors said. The assessment proved correct, with copper retreating 26 percent from a record $10,190 per metric ton in February 2011.

Farmer said his faith makes him a better money manager by keeping him humble. The firm’s offices match his humility, featuring a simple orange sofa in the reception area, gray carpeting and walls free of art. There is no receptionist; visitors press a button on the coffee table to let Farmer and Red Kite’s other co-founder, David Lilley, know they are there.

“Jesus warns us that there are many dangers to money,” Farmer said. “I know that in my heart there is greed, there is wanting just a little bit more. It helps that the Bible tells me to be wary of this and that one day I will fall off my perch.”

Farmer is active in politics, too. He has given millions of pounds in donations to Britain’s ruling Conservative Party, saying it has done more than rivals to promote family values.

Farmer and Lilley, 45, aren’t just owners of futures and options contracts tied to copper; they also trade the physical metal, buying the commodity in North and South America, storing it in warehouses around the world and selling it when the price is right to companies that turn it into the wire and pipes used in the construction of homes and vehicles.

Farmer previously ran MG, which before its sale in 2000 was the world’s biggest copper trader. Lilley also worked at London-based MG. Farmer used that experience as a marketing point when he started RK Capital in 2005.

Physical trading also formed the backbone of what was once the firm’s biggest hedge fund, Red Kite Metals, which oversaw more than $1 billion at its peak, investors said. The fund — named after an endangered bird of prey that is native to Europe and North Africa — proved as volatile as the prices of the metals it buys.

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