Mover:Dow Kim - Diamond LakeInvestment Group LP

Dow Kim, the former head of tradingand investment banking at Merrill Lynch & Co., abandoned plans to start a hedge fund after investors backed out, according totwo people with knowledge of the matter. Kim had been in discussions with institutions that hadagreed to invest about $1 billion combined in his Diamond LakeInvestment Group LP, said the people, who asked not to beidentified because the talks were private. The New York-basedfirm had hired 30 people based on the commitments. The evaporation of credit and declines surpassing20 percent in some stock markets caused the initial investors tochange their minds, said the people. Kim had planned amultistrategy hedge fund that would trade everything fromequities to bonds to currencies. New money coming into hedge fund slowed to $29 billion inthe first half of the year, compared with $118 billion in thesame period last year, according to Chicago-based Hedge FundResearch Inc. Kim, 45, declined to comment. He was the second-highest-paid executive at New York-based Merrill in 2006, when he made$37 million. He left in May 2007 after 13 years at the third-biggest U.S. securities firm. Diamond Lake hires included David Milch, former head ofprime-brokerage services at Merrill Lynch, as chief operatingofficer; Karl Wachter, former general counsel at AmaranthAdvisors LLC, as general counsel; and Bernd Wuebben, former headof fixed income trading strategies at Bear Stearns.