Nancy Havens-Hasty: How to succeed and build a long-term track record in M+A hedge fund strategies

Nancy Havens-Hasty founded her event-driven fund Havens Advisors in 1995 after spending 16 years at Bear Stearns, where she first founded and managed the foreign risk arbitrage effort and then was head of the Bankruptcy Department and co‐head of the High Yield Department.

In this Opalesque.TV interview, Nancy explains the opportunistic motivations for launching her fund in 1995, and describes the different set of marketing challenges that she faced at launch as opposed to today's environment. She describes why she avoids the pitfall of style drift that can plague risk arbitrage strategies and prevent funds from capitalizing on the best emerging opportunities, and multiple market cycles of experience that allows Havens to avoid other industry pitfalls.

Nancy goes on to say that the current environment for M+A is enormously active, with reasonable values leaving targets willing to sell and acquirers excited to buy. This, in conjunction with the gigantic amount of cash on balance sheets of corporations (by some estimates at their highest percentages since the 1940's), makes for an incredibly active market.

In addition, find out about:
• Unique advantage of a cooperative team of high yield and merger arbitrage traders
• The risk arbitrage benefit: Greater insulation from volatility of huge market movements
• Liquidating an entire $50m separately managed account in 9 days in 2008
• Advancement of the woman's credibility in hedge funds

About Nancy Havens-Hasty:
Nancy founded Havens Advisors in 1995. She spent the previous sixteen years at Bear Stearns & Co., Inc., the first seven years in the Risk Arbitrage Department, where she founded and managed the foreign risk arbitrage effort, and the remaining years first as head of theBankruptcy Department and then as co‐head of the High Yield Department. She was named a member of the Bear Stearns Board of Directors in 1992. Throughout Nancy's tenure at the firm, Bear Stearns was recognized as a leader in both the Arbitrage and High Yield/Bankruptcy arenas. The Havens funds, investing in Merger Arbitrage and High Yield/Bankruptcy situations, were a logical outgrowth of those years. Coupled with Nancy's earlier experience as an investment banker and securities analyst (covering technology), her greater than 30 years experience in the investment world has been critical in her ability to effectively manage her team and her portfolio.

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