Scaramucci Skeptical About FTX Restart: ‘I Don’t See How It’s Possible’ (Beincrypto)
SkyBridge Capital founder and former FTX backer Anthony Scaramucci has argued that restarting the failed exchange is impossible. The hedge fund magnate said that a decline in profitability has seen exchanges burn through private funds, making a restart highly unlikely. SkyBridge Founder Questions FTX Restart in Bear Market: “I don’t see how it’s possible to restart FTX,” he said in a recent interview. “Not a lot of money is being made on these exchanges right now, and so a lot of these exchanges are in the red.” He said that exchanges are using privately-raised capital to survive while waiting for an uptick in trading volumes during the next bull market.
Billionaire Ken Griffin Gives $20 Million to Miami Dade College Weeks After $300 Million Harvard Donation (Business Insider)
Ken Griffin‘s South Florida spending spree has now benefited a college where more than half the students are from low-income households. On Saturday, the billionaire founder of hedge fund Citadel donated $20 million to Miami Dade College, one of the country’s largest and most diverse schools. Griffin — who took home $4.1 billion in earnings last year, according to Institutional Investor — has donated hundreds of millions to education. Earlier this month, Griffin gave $300 million to Harvard University, his Ivy League alma mater, where he has now donated more than $500 million.
Bridgewater: The Tightening Cycle is Beginning to Bite (Opalesque.com)
Last year’s historically large and rapid tightening is starting to constrict the financial system and slow the economy, say Bob Prince, Greg Jensen and Karen Karnio-Tambour, co-CIOs at Bridgewater in a recent report. This is necessary and will need to be sustained to restore equilibrium conditions. In the meantime, the CIOs now favour cash in relation to assets in most developed economies and they favour assets in relation to cash in Japan, China, and much of Asia. The tightening cycle began roughly one year ago. It takes about that long for a tightening to have significant economic impacts, and signs are emerging that the effects are now spreading and deepening. A tightening cycle is a cycle of interest rate hikes.
Pixabay/Public Domain
Hedge Fund Capital Up for Second Consecutive Quarter (Hedge Week)
Total hedge fund capital increased for the second consecutive quarter in the first three months of the year, as investors allocated new funds while key banking and financial risks surged and the risk of a recession increased, according to the latest data from HFR. Total global hedge fund capital rose to $3.88 trillion, a quarterly increase of over $50 billion. Investors allocated an estimated $9.1 billion in new capital to the hedge fund industry in Q1 2023, the first quarter of net asset inflows since the first three months of 2022.
Funds Ignore Wall Street’s Resilience, Most Bearish Since 2011: McGeever (Reuters)
Hedge funds remain unconvinced by Wall Street’s recovery from the March banking shock and have instead amassed their biggest bet in over a decade that the S&P 500 will fall. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) data for theweek ending Tuesday, April 18 show that funds and speculative accounts increased their net short position in S&P 500 index futures by 36,645 contracts to just over 680,000 contracts.
Billion-Dollar Hedge Fund Start-Ups Rise to Pre-Pandemic Levels (AFR.com)
The biggest new hedge funds are raising more money, at levels not seen since before the pandemic, and the 2024 crop could include one of the largest start-ups in years. At least four new firms are poised to eclipse $US1 billion ($1.5 billion) by year-end, collectively bringing in at least $US6.5 billion from investors, according to people with knowledge of the fundraising activities.
Former BlackRock Global Equities Head Running Crypto Fund (Blockworks.co)
Old Street Digital, a London crypto asset manager that has quietly assembled a team chock full of deeply credentialed investment veterans, has hit a snag: raising the kind of institutional capital its traders are used to trading. Old Street Digital (OSD) has less than $10 million of assets under management — a drop in the financial bucket from what OSD Chief Investment Officer Gary Clarke handled at BlackRock, where he headed up the traditional finance giant’s global equity team.
DeFi Protocol Thetanuts Finance Raises $17M for Expansion, New Partnerships (CoinDesk)
Decentralized-finance platform Thetanuts Finance has closed a $17 million funding round led by Polychain Capital, Hyperchain Capital and Magnus Capital. The funding will help the company create new partnerships with layer 1 and layer 2 networks, liquidity providers, blockchain foundations, market makers and exchanges. The funding round comes as the industry continues to slowly climb out of the crypto winter deep freeze that nearly stalled the investment landscape.
Monday 4/24 Insider Buying Report: USGO, ARL (Nasdaq.com)
At U.S. Goldmining, a filing with the SEC revealed that on Wednesday, Director Alastair Charles Still purchased 7,600 shares of USGO, at a cost of $10.00 each, for a total investment of $76,000. Investors can bag USGO even cheaper than Still did, with shares trading as low as $8.96 at last check today which is 10.4% under Still’s purchase price. U.S. Goldmining is trading down about 1.4% on the day Monday. This buy marks the first one filed by Still in the past year. And at American Realty Investors, there was insider buying on Wednesday, by Director Bradford A. Phillips who bought 2,000 shares for a cost of $20.00 each, for a trade totaling $40,000. Before this latest buy, Phillips bought ARL at 2 other times during the past year, for a total cost of $66,753 at an average of $15.47 per share. American Realty Investors is trading up about 2.4% on the day Monday. Bargain hunters are able to pick up ARL at a price even lower than Phillips did, with shares changing hands as low as $18.00 in trading on Monday which is 10.0% below Phillips’s purchase price.
Citigroup, Dell And 2 Other Stocks Insiders Are Selling (Benzinga)
AbbVie: The Trade: AbbVie Inc. (ABBV) SVP, US Commercial Operations Elaine K Sorg sold a total of 7,499 shares at an average price of $161.67. The insider received around $1.21 million from selling those shares. Dell Technologies: The Trade: Dell Technologies Inc. (DELL) Chief Accounting Officer Brunilda Rios sold a total of 22,042 shares at an average price of $43.78. The insider received around $965 thousand from selling those shares.
