By Nishant Kumar

Singapore-based asset manager Dymon Asia Capital has partnered former SAC Capital portfolio manager Carl Vine to raise a $500 million global hedge fund to invest in stocks, as investor interest in equity-focused funds makes a strong comeback.

Stock rallies in countries such as the United States and Japan last year attracted as much as $82 billion into long/short equities hedge funds compared with an outflow of $5 billion in 2012, according to industry tracker Eurekahedge.

Returns amounted to almost 15 percent compared with 8 percent in 2012, showed Eurekahedge data.

Dymon, better known for its macro hedge fund, will launch the Port Meadow fund in the second quarter with a strong Asian stocks bias, and with Vine as its chief investment officer.

The fund be no more than $500 million in the first year, Dymon President Jay Luo and Vine said in an email on Monday.

The first $150 million will come from Dymon, a strategic partner and partners of Port Meadow - an Oxford, England-based company which Dymon created to launch the fund.

"This is my second time working with Carl," said Luo, who joined Dymon in 2012 from SAC Capital where he was a managing director and head of Asia-Pacific.

The Port Meadow team "boasts significant shared working history," he said.

Vine joined SAC in 2008 from UBS AG in Hong Kong. He moved to London in October and left SAC a month later, show filings with the U.K.'s Financial Conduct Authority and Hong Kong's Securities and Futures Commission.

Vine will be joined by former SAC colleague Shen Li and David Perrett, who worked with him at UBS.

Dymon, set up by Danny Yong - a former founding partner and chief investment officer of Abax Global Capital - is one of east Asia's biggest home-grown hedge fund companies with about $3.6 billion worth of assets under management.

The company, which also has a currency fund, branched out to private equity in 2012 with a fund backed by a unit of Singapore state investor Temasek Holdings.

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