FourWinds, Agriculture Specialist, Swells Assets by 25% in 2008

By Chanyaporn Chanjaroen

Jan. 13 (Bloomberg) -- FourWinds Capital Management LLC, the Boston-based money manager specialized in agriculture and the environment, said its assets expanded by more than a quarter last year, mostly because of new funds from investors.

Assets climbed to about $1.2 billion by the end of December, Chief Executive Officer Kimberly Tara said in an e-mail. The company may raise more money for its London-listed Phaunos Timber Fund and Ceres Agriculture Fund, she said.

“There is a positive indication for agriculture this year,” said Tara, 39, who co-founded FourWinds in 2005. The “focus on long-term natural resources seems to be growing.”

Hedge funds’ assets shrank to $1.1 trillion last month, from a peak of $1.9 trillion in June, as markets fell and investors pulled out cash, according to Morgan Stanley. Dwight Anderson’s Ospraie Management LLC closed down its biggest fund in September and T. Boone Pickens’s BP Capital LLC allowed investors in its equity fund to withdraw 65 percent of their money.

“Many investors have been punished with long-only commodities exposures and now see the need for proper diversification,” said Michael Laznicka, chief executive officer of Zug, Switzerland-based Gardner Finance AG, which tracks 630 commodity funds. “They become smarter and look into niche commodity strategies for their uncorrelated returns.”

FourWinds may raise as much as $1.6 billion for Phaunos Timber, now managing $550 million. Shares of the fund fell 9.7 percent last year, compared with a 36 percent drop in the Reuters/Jefferies CRB Index of 19 commodities.

Ceres Agriculture, managing $143 million, plans to raise as much as $250 million in share sales through November. Shares of the fund fell 40 percent last year and are trading at a 39 percent discount to net asset value, according to data on Bloomberg.

FourWinds’s Zephyr Commodity Fund, a $460 million fund of hedge funds, lost 2.8 percent in the first 11 months of 2008. Its Aqua fund manages $100 million of assets.

To contact the reporter on this story: Chanyaporn Chanjaroen in London at cchanjaroen@bloomberg.net