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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
“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.”<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n