Hedge Fund Industry Intelligence

LIVING A FAIRY TALE If Disney+ was an animated film character, it would be Prince Charming ... which presumably makes Hulu Quasimodo. The streaming service that saw 10M downloads on the day it launched has continued strong growth over the past four weeks. Third-party app-tracking evaluator Apptopia ...

FundRock Group has appointed Simon Gunson as Managing Director of its UK entity, FundRock Partners Ltd.

RJ O’Brien & Associates (RJO), an independent futures brokerage and clearing firm in the United States, has successfully implemented Itiviti’s Managed FIX Service.

The Philadelphia Inquirer

Following Maples Group’s biennial management elections, Jonathan Green has been appointed as the company’s new Global Managing Partner, with effect from 1 December 2019.

The Swiss Blockchain Federation has published guidelines for issuers of digital equity and related tokens aimed particularly at helping smaller and mid-sized companies to fully leverage the issuance and trading of equity on the blockchain.

As part of a wide ranging 2020 industry trend outlook, a survey of US asset managers and asset owners conducted by State Street Corporation predicts continued prevalence of digital assets as well as a bigger role in the industry for semi-transparent active ETFs.

Geopolitical risks & trade tensions rank as the greatest threat to global financial stability in 2020, according to a new survey published by The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC).

By Gregory Marose –As hedge funds across the globe continue to face fee compression and performance headwinds, there’s a compelling rationale for managers to open up the equity activism playbook. Fund managers with the right expertise and resources can act as their own catalyst for value creation while showing current investors and prospective allocators that they’re able to generate alpha in a differentiated manner. There are even some potential tailwinds for managers to capitalise on right now.

Lexology

Carlos Salas Najera, of the New York City Data Science Academy, has tested an old idea (pairs trading) for a strategy that could be tailored to energy stocks and related ETFs. The resulting paper is “Pairs Trading and VAR Analysis Applied to Energy Stocks.” His latest paper, though, has aRead More

Fort Worth Star-Telegram

Laxman Pai, Opalesque Asia: A survey of US asset managers and asset owners conducted by State Street Corporation predicts the continued prevalence of digital assets. Digital assets continue to come a long way in gaining credibility among institutions, with only six percent of survey respondents rep...

Laxman Pai, Opalesque Asia: A study uncovered what investors are actually paying versus managers' published fee schedules along with a reflection on 2018 fee trends across various asset classes and mandate sizes in active and passive management. The Institutional investment consulting firm Callan's...

Opalesque Industry Update - In a period of significant political unrest in Asia-Pacific - investors withdrew a total $19.2bn from hedge funds in Q1-Q3 2019, said Preqin said. Singapore-based Swiss-Asia Financial Services has generated the highest cumulative net return of 314.69% YTD (as of Septembe...

Omega Funds raises $438m in sixth fund to invest in the future of medicine Omega Funds, a leading international investment firm focused on delivering impactful medicines to patients, today announced the closing of Omega Fund VI, with $438 million in capital commitments. With Fund VI, the firm w...

CalPERS' committee mulls new investment policies From PIonline.com: CalPERS' investment committee is scheduled to decide at its Dec. 16 meeting whether to adopt new investment policies for its private equity and real assets programs that continue to redefine the roles of the staff and the investm...

RTW bets big on biotech From Institutional Investor: Biotech stocks have been among the hottest sectors this year. That's good news for hedge funds specializing in the sector, which have been among the top performers of 2019. The Nasdaq Biotech Index is up more than 20 percent this quarter alone ...

Pimco Investment executive Mihir Worah to retire in March From WSJ: Pacific Investment Management Co.'s Mihir Worah, one of the money manager's investment chiefs and a co-manager on its onetime flagship bond fund, will retire in March, according to an internal memo. Mr. Worah worked for Pimco fo...

AI research reveals crypto leaders are angry and depressed From Bitcoin: An artificial intelligence-driven personality research on the characteristics of crypto industry leaders such as Vitalik Buterin, Justin Sun, and Brian Armstrong found that intellect, liberalism, and cautiousness are their t...

From CNBC: A majority of financial executives in boardrooms around the world say Amazon Founder and Chief Executive Jeff Bezos should be considered as the top businessperson of the decade. Almost a third of chief financial officers (CFOs) quizzed in CNBC's latest Global CFO Council survey picked out...

Icahn lays off workers as firm decamps to Miami From PIonline.com: Activist investor Carl Icahn announced layoffs as he prepares to move his operation to Miami from New York in 2020. Icahn Enterprises will lay off 19 employees from its New York location and another seven employees from its White ...

Wirecard critics targeted in London spy operation From The Union Journal: A former Libyan intelligence chief, who told associates he's a shareholder in German obligations group Wirecard, financed a surveillance operation in London that targeted a series of investors such as hedge fund manager Cri...

India passes controversial citizenship bill that would exclude Muslims From NPR: Police in northeast India fired tear gas into protesters on Wednesday, as clashes escalated over a controversial citizenship bill passed by parliament. The legislation, which the Indian president is expected to sign ...

Private equity's end-of-the-party strategy From Institutional Investor: Flush with cash, private markets managers are trying to be cautious, even as they are confidently putting new money to work in the late stages of a ten-year-old bull market. Almost three-quarters of private equity firms and ...

From CNBC: DoubleLine Capital founder Jeffrey Gundlach believes that long-term Treasury yields are apt to jump over the next few months as the Federal Reserve works to fuel inflation higher. "I can't emphasize enough that October statement by Powell, where he said 'We're not even consideri...

Varma invests $556m in US equities via new co-developed ESG ETF From IPE: Finnish pensions insurer Varma has invested €500m ($556m) in a new US exchange-traded fund (ETF) it developed in conjunction with Legal General Investment Management (LGIM) and the index investment company Foxberry...

A hedge fund-backed art dealer just lost an $11m ruling to Sotheby's over an allegedly fake painting From Business Insider: Hedge fund founder David Kowitz is on the hook for roughly $6.6 million after a London judge ordered the investor to pay Sotheby's for an allegedly fake painting. The case ...

From Reuters: The first public report on climate-related risks to financial markets ever commissioned by a U.S. market regulator will be out in June, the head of the group charged with writing it said on Wednesday. The report, by a 35-member panel formed last month by the Commodity Futures Trading...

Activism is the No. 1 way to create superior returns, hedge fund manager Jamie Dinan says From CNBC: York Capital Management founder Jamie Dinan said the best way to create superior return is through activism. "In order to create alpha right now, activism is number one in my book, and I ...

CNBC

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Former Libyan intelligence chief oversaw surveillance of investors including Crispin Odey

Business Insider

York Capital Management founder Jamie Dinan said the best way to create superior return is through activism. "In order to create alpha right now, activism is number one in my book, and I think that's ...

'"When you hear that, that the Fed is cheerleading inflation higher ... what that says is that the path of least resistance for the 10-year is higher," Gundlach said.

For the last five years, Brent Goettshe and four buddies had a pretty good thing going: They ran a bitcoin-mining shop, the unfortunately-named BitClub Network, sold shares of the proceeds to investors, raised almost three-quarters of a billion dollars and then made a bunch of shit up in order to ...

Business Insider

(Bloomberg) -- Citadel Securities is sometimes dismissively referred to as “Citadel’s trading arm” -- seen as a forgotten backwater of Ken Griffin’s hedge fund empire, where quants toil on complex ...

The Exchange Council of the European Energy Exchange (EEX) has confirmed the appointment of Dr Wolfgang von Rintelen to the Exchange Management Board of EEX.

SteelEye, a compliance technology and data analytics firm, has taken the next step in its international expansion plan with the opening of a new office in Paris.

Saudi Arabia really wanted its oil company, Saudi Aramco, to be worth $2 trillion. It did everything it could to get it there, including this: He unleashed a torrent of expletives in Arabic and English that shocked the roomful of battle-hardened bankers. The chairman was probably worried about ...

In this latest podcast, produced in association with SEI, Michiel Meeuwissen (pictured), Head of Hedge Fund Solutions at Kempen Capital Management, and SEI’s Ross Ellis,discuss the evolution of asset management, and in particular two key trends – vulnerable economics, and emboldened investors.

Cryptonews

Business Insider

International Business Times

Mondaq News Alerts

High growth algorithmic trading company, Vanguard Capital AG, has appointed Ritabrata Bhattacharyya (Rito) to its Senior Management team.

Guernsey Finance CEO, Dominic Wheatley (pictured), is to stand down from his role after five years. Wheatley will leave the promotional agency on the 30 June 2020, having been in the role since December 2014.

Crypto Asset Rating(CAR), the Independent Structured Rating Agency, has expanded its global team with the appointment ofJacob Prudhomme as Chief Legal Officer.

iM Global Partner, an investment and development platform focused on acquiring strategic investments in traditional and alternative investment firms in the US, Europe and Asia, has appointed Peter Stockall to lead sales in the US Offshore and Latin America region.

Exchange Data International’s (EDI) Worldwide Corporate Actions (WCA) data and Security Reference Data (SRF) services are now available for purchase in AWS Data Exchange.

iNVEZZ

By Don A Steinbrugge (pictured), Agecroft Partners – The CFA Institute has released and circulated the final version of its guidelines to improve performance standards in the hedge fund industry. They will go into effect on 1 January, 2020.We strongly support the effort to create and implement performance standards in the industry and believe that the CFA Institute is the right organisation to lead this charge.

Washington Post

"All of the fundamentals of the value of the network are rising — and they're rising exponentially," said Mark Yusko.

We aren't sure whether value stocks outperform growth, but we follow hedge fund investor letters to understand where the markets and stocks might be going. This article will lay out and discuss the ...

HedgeCo.net

CIO Applications

FX Empire

Disruption is the trend of the moment in many industries and the investment world is no exception. Deloitte Insights has just posted an article that takes a comprehensive look at the investment world today, traditional and alternative. Its theme is that this world is in search of new leadership andRead More

The Oxford-Man Institute of Quantitative Finance was founded in 2007

Laxman Pai, Opalesque Asia: Greater China's staggering $600bn in Private equity and venture capital (PE VC) assets under management (AUM), up 36% from the previous year, suggests an industry transitioning impressively. Yet, this latest rate of year-on-year growth is the slowest since 2014. Acco...

Laxman Pai, Opalesque Asia: New York-based hedge fund firm Perceptive Advisors closed its inaugural venture capital fund, the Perceptive Xontogeny Venture Fund, at $210million. The investment firm with a long history of funding publicly traded and later-stage privately held life sciences companies s...

Laxman Pai, Opalesque Asia: Nasdaq, a global electronic marketplace for buying and selling securities, has launched a new platform to boost investor access to environmental, social and sustainability bonds in n an effort to help promote sustainable investing. The exchange has launched a venue, know...

From Bloomberg: Say what you like about outspoken activist hedge fund investors such as Carl Icahn, Bill Ackman, Paul Singer or Dan Loeb but at least you know where they stand. Nowadays it's more fashionable for activist funds to refrain from public criticism and work constructively behind the scene...

BMO GAM unveils three sustainable strategies From Funds Europe: BMO Global Asset Management (BMO GAM) has launched three sustainable multi-asset funds with varying risk profiles. The actively managed strategies form part of the firm's low-cost Universal Multi-Asset Portfolios (Map) range and will b...

Maverick posts huge November gains From Institutional Investor: Maverick Capital posted explosive results in November, far exceeding the performance of most hedge funds. As a result, the firm, which had been faltering somewhat since a strong first quarter, is poised to post its best results in many...

Orange County Employees allocates $255m to 2 managers From PIonline.com: Orange County Employees Retirement System, Santa Ana, Calif., allocated $255 million to two managers. OCERS hired Systematic Financial Management to manage $150 million in a domestic value-oriented equity strategy that invests...

Wall Street pays attention when David Tepper makes an investment move. Tepper started out his career as a credit analyst with Goldman Sachs in the 1980s, diving right away into risky bonds and other distressed debt assets. Older financial hands noticed that Tepper was right more than he was wrong wi...

MarketWatch

France's new 'Napoleon Bitcoin Fund' is tied to CME's cash-settled futures From Coin Desk: French asset management firm Napoleon AM has launched a new fund tied to Chicago Mercantile Exchange's (CME) cash-settled bitcoin futures. The "Napoleon Bitcoin Fund" began trading on Dec...

Will McKinsey finally have to reveal more hedge fund connections? From Institutional Investor: As global consultancy McKinsey and retired turnaround pro Jay Alix move closer to a February trial over McKinsey's disclosures surrounding its potential bankruptcy advisory work with Westmoreland Coal, th...

Hedge funds are all over U.K. politics seeking edge on vote From Yahoo: To help shape his investment position ahead of Thursday's U.K. general election, hedge fund manager Luke Newman turned to a new source of wisdom. Rather than seek counsel from corporate executives, he sought out those directly ...

Bridgewater ready to accept funds from Japanese investors: CIO From Nikkei: Bob Prince, co-Chief Investment Officer of Bridgewater Associates, addressed challenges faced by the global economy, and spoke of his desire to "build quality client relationships," including in Japan, in ...

69% of private equity CFOs and COOs expect levels of dry powder to increase next year From Mondaq: Over two thirds (69%) of chief financial officers (CFOs) and chief operating officers (COOs) at UK-based private equity and venture capital firms expect levels of dry powder- money raised but not yet ...

From Institutional Investor: Chicago Cubs legend Ernie Banks was famously passionate about the joy he derived from baseball, summed up by his mantra, "It's a beautiful day - let's play two." To the team behind Invesco's Active Multi-Sector Credit Strategy, enthusiasm runs equally d...

Calpers says one-fifth of public holdings exposed to climate risk From Reuters: About one-fifth of the California Public Employees' Retirement System public markets portfolio is exposed to potential losses from climate change, the $381 billion pension fund manager reported this week in its first ev...

Investors need more clarity on Japan's 'anti-activism' law From FT: In the face of predictable outrage from overseas hedge funds and banks, Japanese regulators have, just like those Great Escape tunnel diggers, shifted into a "nothing to see here" mode that could be more unsettlin...

Billionaire Ray Dalio calls the late Paul Volcker 'the greatest American hero I've known' From Business Insider: Dalio says that the greatest American he's ever known is the Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve who died on Sunday, aged 92. In a LinkedIn post, late on Monday, ...

Sidney Sun Telegraph

Brevan Howard Asset Management is again backing Adam Fisher, a global-macro manager whose capital-raising efforts appear to be rapidly gaining momentum.The arrangement saw Brevan Howard buy a minority stake in Commonwealth Asset Management, a Los Angeles firm that Fisher began setting up upon his January 2019 exit from Soros Fund Management. While terms of the deal remain unclear, indications are that the injection is substantial.Fisher,...

Two launches in two weeks amid strong demand from institutional investors

New rules shelter companies from shake-ups but implementation has been vague

Welcome to Due Diligence, the FT’s daily deals briefing

JD Supra

Institutional Investor

Institutional Investor

Bloomberg

CryptoGlobe

The Eurekahedge Hedge Fund Index gained 0.84 per cent in November, supported by the strong performance of the global equity market as represented by the 2.76 per cent gain recorded by the MSCI ACWI (Local).

Bernie Madoff is having the time of his life at the minimum-security federal resort down in North Carolina. His predecessor in Ponzi scheming, Samuel Israel, is not, and he thinks that half of his 22-year sentence is more than enough for him to have learned his lesson. The judge who imposed that ...

GCM Grosvenor, a global alternative asset manager, has completed the final close for Multi-Asset Class Fund II at the high end of its targeted capital raise with USD983 million in committed capital.

Bloomberg

Arabian Bourse (ABX), which has received In-principal Approval from the Financial Services Regulatory Authority (FSRA) of Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM) top operate as a crypto asset exchange and custodian, has received a double digit multi-million dollar investment from HBK-GoChain.

More and more professional investment allocators are directly asking about sexual harassment during the fund manager due diligence process, while a rising number of allocators – nearly 1-in-10 – upon identifying sexual harassment issues would still invest with a given manager.

Just over a month ago, Bill Ackman was playing coy. He’d poured as much as 9.5% of his investors’ money into something, but he couldn’t say just what yet. He hadn’t finished buying it yet, and anyway, already up by 45% on the year and drunk on love and kombucha, he didn’t see the harm in having a ...

Murano’s Ole Rollag (pictured) reflects on the past year and makes his predictions for hedge funds in 2020…

MarketWatch

The lure of an attractive yield has made property companies and real estate investment trusts (REITs) particularly interesting at the moment.

As global consultancy McKinsey and retired turnaround pro Jay Alix move closer to a February trial over McKinsey’s disclosures surrounding its potential bankruptcy advisory work with Westmoreland Coal ...

Yahoo News

After four years, the civil case of Renegade Swish versus the assistant house manager is going to trial. In 2015, Fort Worth hedge fund manager Geoffrey Raynor, through his company Renegade Swish (a ...

CUTTING SZN Imagine getting fired this week, right before getting together with family for the holidays. That would suck … Welp, from 1.5k employees at Morgan Stanley that nightmare is about to play out in real life. The bank announced yesterday that it is laying off employees in the tech and ...

Boutique law firm Kleinberg Kaplan has appointed Joshua M Kaplan as a partner in its Estate Planning and Administration Practice. He joins from Dechert.

Refinitiv has expanded its long term partnership with Antara, Indonesia's national news agency to provide customers with access to in-depth news and information in Bahasa Indonesian and English across Refinitiv's products, including via Eikon.

State Street Corporation has appointed Brian Franz as chief information officer (CIO). Franz, who joins the Company in January 2020, will report to Chief Operating Officer, Lou Maiuri and become a member of State Street’s Management Committee, its senior-most strategy and policy making group.

Bloomberg

Following the announcement of their strategic partnership in September 2019, Sanne and Colmore have now entered into the next phase of development.

NZX and the European Energy Exchange (EEX) have announced a Co-operation Agreement with a focus on securing new opportunities in the New Zealand carbon market.

CoinDesk

Opalesque

HedgeCo.net

The National

Business Day

Investor says Broadmark trades at a meaningful discount to its peers despite having a higher-quality loan portfolio

Bailey McCann, Opalesque New York: Marketing is an increasingly important aspect of the business of asset management, but a new survey from Cutter Associates shows that asset managers are slow to act and haven 't fully embraced data capture and marketing automation. The survey results point to an ...

Laxman Pai, Opalesque Asia: Los Angeles-based buyout firm Leonard Green Partners (LPG) has raised $14.75 billion for two new funds, including a middle-market focused fund. The private-equity firm collected the total in roughly seven months, including $12 billion for its latest flagship buyout fun...

Laxman Pai, Opalesque Asia: The US-based mid-market private equity firm Parthenon Capital closed its growth-oriented private equity fund Parthenon Investors VI at its hard cap of $2 billion. The closing exceeds its fundraising target of $1.5 billion, said a press note. Investors include the $30 b...

UBS plans long-short fund with ESG strategy From Institutional Investor: UBS Group's multistrategy hedge fund business is planning to launch a long-short fund to make bets tied to environmental, social and governance criteria, according to the unit's chief investment officer. Kevin Russell, CIO...

Citadel surges past multistrat peers From Institutional Investor: Citadel's main multistrategy fund is poised to post its best results in at least five or six years, depending on how it fares in the final month of the year.The hedge fund firm's Wellington fund gained 1.3 percent in November and i...

Texas Teachers assigns more than $500m to alts From PIonline.com: The $154.6 billion Texas Teacher Retirement System, Austin, committed $525 million to three private equity/venture capital managers in November, a monthly transaction report showed. Members of the plan's private equity team awarde...

Pershing Square reports stake in Agilent Technologies From WSJ: Bill Ackman's hedge fund Pershing Square Capital Management on Monday disclosed a 2.9 million-share stake in laboratory instrument and software company Agilent Technologies Inc. The stake was disclosed in an amendment to Pershing Sq...

GAM fixed income and FX trading head to exit From Financial News: GAM, the Swiss asset manager reportedly considering hundreds of job cuts under its recently appointed chief executive, is about to lose another high profile employee from its ranks. Christopher Jarman, head of fixed income and FX ...

Saga, a blockchain firm advised by Nobel laureate Myron Scholes just launched a rival to Facebook's libra From CNBC: One blockchain company thinks it has an alternative to Facebook's digital currency proposal. With an advisory board that includes top economists like Nobel Prize-winner Myron Schol...

UBS hedge fund CIO sees 'peak anxiety' before U.S. elections From Bloomberg: U.S. equity markets should prepare for more turbulence as the 2020 presidential election draws near, according to Kevin Russell, chief investment officer of UBS O'Connor, the $5.1 billion hedge fund unit at UBS Group AG....

Now repo distortions emerge in Europe's $9tn market The European repo market may have escaped the kind of turmoil that engulfed the U.S. financial system this year, but that doesn't mean all is calm. The 8 trillion-euro ($9 trillion) market is becoming increasingly fragmented, according to the B...

The truth about private equity fund size From Institutional Investor: As the end of the year approaches, institutional investors in private markets are wrapping up work on the last few funds we need to invest in to hit our targeted annual commitment levels. You see, private equity is sort of li...

CDC, Laerernes commit to Amundi, EIB green bond program From PIonline.com: French and Danish asset owners have invested in Green Credit Continuum program, which has raised euro;253 million ($278.4 million) as of Nov. 30 to support green debt issuance in Europe, the European Investment Bank said ...

From Reuters: The ailing former Bayou hedge fund manager Samuel Israel has lost his bid for an early end to his 22-year prison sentence for running a $450 million fraud, as a U.S. judge found it would make a "mockery" of federal sentencing laws to set him free. Chief Judge Colleen...

S.Africa: Are we missing out on hedge fund diversification? From Business Live: Local hedge funds have slowly been cleaning up their act to be more appealing to ordinary investors. But they still have a way to go before financial advisers and investment platforms make them readily accessible. Hed...

From BizarreNews: A New York state college professor set his second Guinness World Record when he bent seven steel railroad spikes in one minute. William Clark, a professor in the Binghamton University health and wellness department and a former Olympic strongman, bent seven steel spikes at the coll...

Jim Gorman doesn’t need to let anyone go this holiday season. Morgan Stanley’s still No. 1 in trading. It bested estimates in the third quarter. Shares are up 25% this year. In spite of all that, Gorman feels uneasy. Brexit, Trump, macroeconomic concerns, a general malaise, a certain sense of ...

Reuters UK

Bloomberg

Bloomberg

Agilent Technologies gain after-hours trading after hedge fund investor Bill Ackman revealed he has taken a stake in the company.

CNBC

Bloomberg

Bloomberg

For months, even as California firestarter PG&E did all it could to keep itself out of his hands, Paul Singer seemed to have the upper hand. However Gov. Gavin Newsom felt about the hedge fund manager, Elliott Management and its fellow PG&E bondholders had kept the utility’s victims The post appeared first on dealbreaker..

Pimco, CQS, Hayfin all have plans to launch funds investing in crumbling companies

The search for unfairly undervalued energy investments is peppered with difficulties

Law360

Business Insider

After a lifetime working his way up the rungs at HSBC, John Flint managed to muck things up so royally that he was escorted out after just 18 months in the top job. Still, five months later the stench in the boardroom is so great that a number of other longtime veterans infected by it now have to ...

Neuberger Berman has launched the Neuberger Berman Macro Opportunities FX Fund, which aims to deliver positive returns of 5-6 per cent in excess of cash per annum before fees, primarily by exploring relative value across G10 currencies.

Before putting in our own effort and resources into finding a good investment, we can quickly utilize hedge fund expertise to give us a quick glimpse of whether that stock could make for a good ...

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker is dead at the age of 92. But given the thankless, miserable world in which he ended his life, he might as well have died at 82. For however nice the book deal, score-settling and encomium from Ray Dalio have been, Volcker was unfortunate to live just ...

Risk concentration in investor portfolios has been building in a prevailing ‘risk-on’ environment, leading to substantial growth in global equity markets over the past decade. There are numerous reasons for this, led principally by the decisive action of central bankers to print money through quantitative easing. This has led to an artificial suppression of market volatility causing equities to boom and fixed income yields to head into unparalleled negative territory.