When it comes to investment banking, private equity and trading, there's not much you can find fault with Goldman Sachs Group (NYSE: GS).
Even so, there continues to be a nagging problem -- that is, the Global Alpha fund. With $10 billion in assets, its Goldman's biggest hedge fund.
And the performance has been lackluster over the past year.
According to a report in Bloomberg.com, Global Alpha shed 5.7% in February (a big problem was a wayward bet on the yen). For the year, the fund is down about 2%.
Oh, and in 2006, the fund lost 9%.
Yes, this is a pretty bad trend. While it's true that Goldman continues to rack up huge management fees, this cannot go on for very long. Basically, investors may start moving some money out.
This does show that Goldman is human (the funny thing is that Global Alpha relies heavily on computer trading). But if things don't improve, I think we will probably see new managers at Global Alpha.
Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including the Complete M&A Handbook and the EDGAR-Online Guide to Decoding Financial Statements.
