Distressed Debt Investors Club in Institutional Investor

If you did not see it today, the Distressed Debt Investors Club was part of an article in Institutional Investor. Here are some pertinent quotes:

To manage what traders might call the high “signal-to-noise ratio” of public web sites, at least three private online communities now cater specifically to professional investors: Value Investors Club and Distressed Debt Investors Club, which were founded in 2000 and 2009, respectively, and each cap their membership at 250 investors, who are anonymous to fellow users; and SumZero, which launched in 2008, combines user-generated investment research with social networking features and now boasts a membership of more than 4,000 buy-side analysts and portfolio managers.

And...

Networking and information exchange may be especially valuable in niche areas of the market. A case in point is Distressed Debt Investors Club, the brainchild of a credit analyst who goes by the handle “Hunter” and has eight years of experience on the buy side. Hunter, who declines to reveal his real name or the name of his employer, says that about three quarters of the roughly 200 investment ideas on the web site are distressed-debt and event-driven plays, with the remainder split between equity and special-situations opportunities.

“A lot of people on the site have either formal credit training or a leveraged finance background, so people understand the bankruptcy and restructuring process,” explains Hunter, who says his site marries the best of Value Investors Club and SumZero. (He is a member of both.) “On other sites or in sell-side reports, you might not have people well versed enough to understand the implications of, say, a fraudulent conveyance ruling.”

Great stuff! I will write a lengthy article this weekend talking about how well the DDIC is doing and future plans for that site (as well as this one).

Here is the link to the full article:

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