Hideki Wakabayashi sat through 500 meetings with company executives before settling on the stocks that produced a 13 percent advance last year for the long-short equity hedge fund he runs at Tokyo-based Finnowave Investments.
Toru Hashizume matched Wakabayashi's performance with a 13 percent return for his Ginga Service Sector Fund by following a similar path. He said he sifted through 800 stocks before betting on about 70.
The Japanese hedge fund managers plan to beat benchmarks again in 2009 by shunning computer-driven trading in favor of company research. Their gains contrast with the average 19 percent drop of global hedge funds, according to data compiled by Chicago-based Hedge Fund Research Inc., and the 42 percent slump in the Nikkei 225 stock average during 2008, the index's worst annual performance.
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