Old Pine, Traxis and Helios Bet On India

Lone Pine Capital LLC, run by Stephen Mandel, and Traxis Partners LLC are among56 overseas funds that registered to buy shares in India in July, the most in six months, betting on a recovery in stocks. Helios Capital Management Pte and StonewaterCapital LLC also won approval from the nation's regulator, nine months after authorities forced hedge funds to register.

India's stock market recovered its $1 trillion in market value last month, helped by the biggest drop in commodity prices in 28 years. The new funds may help reverserecord sales of stocks by overseas investors that led to the biggest first-half slump in the Sensitive Index since its 1979 creation.
``India is one of the bigger beneficiaries of commodity and oil weakness as money flows from commodity-producer countries to consumers,'' said Samir Arora, who oversees $1billion at Helios Capital Management in Singapore and received regulatory approvalon July 21. ``Foreign institutional-investor selling has normally marked a bottom, it will be the same again.''
Investments in emerging markets including India may help revive returns in the $1.9 trillion hedge fund industry that's heading for its worst year in two decades after bets on U.S.financial stocks backfired. Banks and brokerages have written down $493 billion and raised $353 billion in capital since the start of 2007 as the U.S. subprime-mortgage market collapsed.Halted TradingProposals by the regulator in October to curb offshore investment vehicles used by hedge funds triggered a panic among investors that halted trading on Mumbai exchangesfor an hour and wiped out $100 billion of value in a day.
The funds were ordered to register in India to buy stocks, or given 18 months to sell their holdings. The tighter rules helped spark a sell-off of shares by investors based outside India, which have sold $6.4 billion of equities this year. Last year, global investors bought a record$17.2 billion of stocks, according to the regulator.
Caxton Associates LLC, an $11 billion fund started by Bruce Kovner, and Daniel Loeb's Third Point LLC are among 293 funds approved to buy shares in India this year, according the regulator's Web site. That's 20 percent of all registrations since the market was opened to foreign investment 15 years ago, according to calculations by Bloomberg News.
Middle East investors including the Brunei Investment Agency, the Abu Dhabi Investment Council and Qatar Insurance Co. can also buy equities in India for the first time as they seek greater returns on their oil earnings. The Gulf Cooperation Council states, whichtogether pump about one-fifth of the world's crude, earn more than $1.2 billion a day from oil sales.The following table is a list of funds registered with the Securities & Exchange Board of India since January 2008