Bloomberg – Craig Ferguson, a former senior foreign-exchange strategist at Australia & New Zealand Banking Group Ltd., has set up a hedge fund, betting the Australian dollar will surge to a 22-year high in the next 12 months.
Ferguson left the Melbourne offices of the nation’s third- biggest lender in April to work from home. His Antipodean Capital Management aims to tap pension funds and wealthy individuals for funds to bet on the currency, on prospects for a pick-up in growth and gains in interest rates.
“The Australian dollar is undervalued,” Ferguson said in a June 16 interview. “The economy is picking up and interest rates look set to rise once, if not twice.”
He forecasts the Australian dollar, which was trading at 73.70 U.S. cents at 10:42 a.m. in New York, will reach 90 U.S. cents by June 2007. That would be the highest since June 1984, according to data that Bloomberg compiled.
Ferguson, 36, teamed up with Simon Ho, a former currency options trader at Deutsche Bank AG in Sydney, to form Antipodean, which began trading in February. The two met in their first week as traders at JPMorgan Chase & Co. in May 1994, with Ho now also working from home in Sydney.
