Day: October 2, 2025

The Philippines is no stranger to earthquakes—it sits on the seismically active Pacific Ring of Fire. But a temblor which struck on Tuesday, Sept. 30, became the deadliest the country has ever experienced since at least 2013.

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A 6.9-magnitude quake hit just before 10 p.m. local time (10 a.m. ET), Philippine seismologists reported, off the shore of coastal Bogo City (pop. 90,000) in the island province of Cebu in the archipelagic Southeast Asian country’s center. 

The quake’s epicenter was shallow, only some 5 km below the surface, which means its energy needed to travel less distance before hitting infrastructure. The seismic energy was strong enough to cause buildings to collapse—including a century-old church—and to leave cracks on bridges. In one affected town, the quake led to part of a sports complex collapsing on spectators of a basketball game. In Bogo City,  a village reported some 10 casualties, despite being made up of “disaster resilient homes” that housed survivors of a devastating supertyphoon back in 2013. 

A tsunami alert was issued for several Philippine regions, though that has since been lifted as of Thursday.

National disaster officials reported at least 72 people died and 294 were injured after the quake, though the official toll could increase in the coming days.

Civil defense official Bernardo Rafaelito Alejandro IV told a news conference from Manila on Wednesday that the country was “still in the golden hour of our search and rescue,” adding that there “are still many reports of people who were pinned or hit by debris.” By Thursday afternoon, the national police said all missing individuals had been accounted for.

Alejandro added that the quake was particularly deadly because it happened at night. “In the morning, we are all alert, but at night when everyone is asleep, it takes time for us to react.”

A state of calamity was issued over the province on Wednesday, and on Thursday, President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. visited hard-hit areas to assess the extent of the damage.

Here’s what to know.

Battered by natural disasters

Tuesday’s quake is the deadliest the country has experienced since October 2013, when more than 200 people died in the Philippines’ central region after a 7.2-magnitude quake struck the neighboring island of Bohol.

Besides being a hotbed of seismic activity, the Philippines is also among the most climate-vulnerable countries globally, seeing more than 20 typhoons and tropical storm systems yearly.

The Cebu quake also happened after a tropical storm late last week battered Cebu and other provinces in the country’s central region. That storm separately left at least 27 people dead—many knocked down by felled trees or drowned—and cut power to cities and towns and forced thousands of people to evacuate their homes. It also increased the risk of landslides after heavy rains soaked hillsides and softened soil. 

The quake and the storm combined caused widespread power outages, affecting hospitals and first responders’ ability to attend to victims. 

Latest figures from national disaster officials show that more than 170,000 people were affected by the quake, and 20,000 have been displaced.

A ‘Big One’ in Manila?

The latest quake in the central region has raised fears of a major temblor happening in the capital Manila, which many have ominously nicknamed the “Big One.”

A fault system in the metropolitan Manila region has recorded seismic activity that could reach up to a magnitude 7.2. Such quakes in this fault system happen every 200 to 400 years, and the last recorded tremor from the area was in the 1600s.

Such a sizable quake could cause some 168,000 buildings to collapse and more than 33,000 people to die in Manila and neighboring provinces.

Alejandro said lessons from the Cebu earthquake should be applied when the “Big One” strikes the capital. “We can never be 100% prepared,” he said. “Events like this [earthquake], for us also, is one way of practice. Can you imagine if it happens in Metro Manila at night?”

• September is a month full of hedge-fund conferences in New York, Connecticut, London, and more.
• People on the ground at these events told Business Insider what the chatter was about.
• Goldman Sachs and Kepler hosted events at sports stadiums, while Morgan Stanley and Citi opted for smaller venues.

September brings cooler weather, weekends filled with football, and plenty of hedge fund conferences.

Last month, managers and allocators in the $4.7 trillion industry had many opportunities to compare notes and share gossip.

Events hosted by Goldman Sachs and industry consultant Kepler at Citi Field and Wembley Stadium, respectively, brought hedge fund managers and those who invest in them to sports venues. Meanwhile, Morgan Stanley and Citi held more low-key affairs in venues based in Greenwich and Manhattan.

Business Insider spoke with attendees of these industry events last month to get a sense of the on-the-ground sentiment. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because the conferences were closed to the press. Here’s what they said.

Allocators are worried about a shaky market

One manager who attended Morgan Stanley’s three-day event at the Greenwich Hyatt Regency in the middle of the month said allocators are concerned about a market pullback — but aren’t yet ready to ditch US stocks.

There’s a fear the party’s ending, “but no one wants to make the first move,” this person said. Over the conference, they met with dozens of allocators, including many institutional investors such as pensions and endowments.

“People are uncomfortably comfortable,” they said. This sentiment has been lingering for months now as US equities continue to tick up despite worries about President Donald Trump’s tariff policies slowing global trade. A survey released at the end of July found that nearly half of the dozens of institutional investors questioned believed markets were too complacent about tariffs.

What this means in practice is a search for managers that can perform in market downturns. Those with proven track records shorting stocks are in demand, two fund founders who attended the September conferences said.

One person who attended Goldman Sachs’ event at Citi Field, the home of Major League Baseball’s New York Mets in Queens, said managers trading international stocks were of interest to big American allocators.

“There’s a continued interest to get away from the States, even though the market keeps chugging along,” this person said, of their takeaways from meeting with dozens of potential LPs.

A recent report from law firm Seward & Kissel found that more funds were including Trump’s trade deals and tariffs as potential risk factors in their regulatory filings.

The “highly uncertain global macro and regulatory environment” is having “a significant impact on the disclosures” funds are sharing with investors, the report reads.

A new fund from Bridgewater caught some eyes

At Kepler’s Wembley Stadium event, there were plenty of big-name managers speaking and meeting with allocators. Leda Braga, the founder of Systematica and a former BlueCrest executive, gave a fireside chat to start the event, and other quants, such as AQR and Paris-based Capital Fund Management, met with institutional investors.

A new offering from $98 billion Bridgewater Associates — a fixed-income fund for non-US investors meant to take advantage of “global divergences,” according to the fund’s fact sheet — is hoping to meet the uncertain moment for antsy allocators.

The fact sheet for the Absolute Return Fixed Income strategy said it trades bonds and currencies, and is attractive now because “higher interest rates on both the long and short end of the curve, positive real yields and term premiums, and market volatility have all returned.”

One Europe-based allocator who met with Bridgewater in a group setting with other institutions at the Kepler event told BI that it’s the type of product firms roll out when stock markets seem at their peak.

The factsheet said the strategy is up 6.8% since it started trading in March of this year through August. The manager simulated performance for the past two decades and states that the fund — which wants to have 65% of its assets in interest rates trades, 20% in credit bets, and the rest in currency plays — would have returned 9.4% in 2008 and 21.7% in 2022.

“AFRI is a fully liquid, fully alpha strategy targeting a net excess return of 5%+ a year at 10% volatility that is designed to have no structural exposure or correlation to markets or other managers over time,” the factsheet reads.

Multistrategy exhaustion, but still a demand for multistrategy-like returns

Multistrategy firms like Millennium, Citadel, and Point72 have come to dominate industry talk in recent years thanks to their unprecedented size and the unrelenting talent war that has allowed portfolio managers to sell their services to the highest bidder.

The increasing cost of these platforms — and the fact that the most coveted firms are closed to new investors — has soured the sector in the eyes of some allocators. The recent closure of Eisler Capital, due to high costs and low returns, may be an inflection point.

There is, however, still a demand for the market-neutral returns they provide.

It’s why new launches that spin out of these firms — from portfolio managers who have traded in the multistrategy style for years — have become some of the most sought-after funds, two different managers said.

“Allocators seem to crave low-net strategies,” said one manager who attended an emerging manager conference in New York put on by Citi. This individual, who met with different potential backers at the conference along with roughly a dozen other stockpicking funds, said interest was higher in investors with a multistrategy background than those with a more growth equity mindset, such as spin-offs from Tiger Cubs.

Allocators investing in these spin-outs often require managers to accept capital via a separately managed account, which allows allocators more transparency into the returns and strategy.

Younger managers refusing to take SMAs found their dance cards empty at these conferences, two people who attended the Citi and Morgan Stanley conferences said.

“You can’t raise money from institutions anymore without saying yes to SMAs,” one fund manager said.