Exclusive: Highfields Capital wants to shrink, return some capital

Highfields Capital, which oversees $13 billion in assets, said it can deliver better returns with less money and is planning to return some capital at the end of the year.

The Boston based hedge fund firm will stop taking in new money at the end of the year and will likely return between 5 percent and 15 percent of its capital to investors at that time, the firm said in a letter seen by Reuters.

"While we are quite comfortable with our ability to generate good returns at our current size, we would rather be slightly smaller and generate better ones," Jonathon Jacobson, who co-founded the Boston-based firm in 1998, wrote in the letter.

The fund gained 23 percent in the first nine months of 2013, an investor said.

(Reporting by Svea Herbst-Bayliss; Editing by Gerald E. McCormick)