July 1 (Bloomberg) -- Three traders from Brevan Howard Asset Management LLP and RBS Greenwich Capital Markets started a government-bond hedge fund named for one of their favorite songs by the Who.

5:15 Capital Management LLC, taken from the track “5:15” on the British rockers’ 1973 album “Quadrophenia,” will begin trading today with about $60 million, according to Morris Sachs, one of the founders, who said the fund will soon grow to $100 million. EG Fisher, 40, and Rob Wahl, 42, have joined him at the Greenwich, Connecticut-based fund and will be managing partners.

“We’re all Who fans and love that tune,” Sachs, the fund’s chief risk officer, said in a telephone interview. “What are we going to do, try to find another name for the Greek god of money?”

About 150 hedge funds were started from January through March, the most since the second quarter of 2008, according to data compiled by Chicago-based Hedge Fund Research Inc. Fund assets may increase by more than 8 percent this year as clients led by pension plans and rich families invest $50 billion of the cash they held while financial markets fell, according to a June 2 report by Barclays Plc.

Sachs, 48, said the team, which has worked together for about 12 years, chose the name rather than one more typical of the thousands of hedge funds because they liked the Pete Townshend-written song, which includes the line “out of my brain on a train.”

State Street Corp., the world’s second-largest administrator to hedge funds, with about $252 billion in assets, said most of its clients defer to place names or initials.

Avoid Irony

“People are looking for something that’s memorable,” said John Klinck, global head of the Boston-based company’s alternative-investments unit. “You really just want to avoid something that could become ironic like, say, ‘Peak Performance,’ and have lousy returns, or initials that could be mocked.”

Money is beginning to flow into funds as performance rebounds this year, with returns averaging 9.8 percent through May, according to an index published by Chicago-based Hedge Fund Research Inc. The industry had net inflows of $1.5 billion in May, the first gain in 10 months, Singapore-based Eurekahedge Pte said.

‘Macro’ Trends

Sachs, Fisher and Wahl worked at Greenwich Capital, which became part of Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc, and then at Brevan Howard. They were at Brevan from March until November 2008, when the London-based hedge-fund firm discontinued most of its U.S. trading operations.

The firm’s 5:15 Master Fund Ltd. will trade government debt from the world’s seven largest economies, Sachs said. The managers will try to spot differences in relative values between bonds, coupled with what Sachs described as a “macro-overlay,” looking at macroeconomic trends for patterns in interest rates and yield curves. The fund has the capacity to handle as much as $1 billion, Wahl said in an e-mail.

The name hasn’t hurt the fund’s ability to raise money, Sachs said.

“People are agnostic,” Sachs said. “Some think it’s either the time we get here in the morning or the time we leave.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Tom Cahill in London at tcahill@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: July 1, 2009 11:30 EDT