China’s Top Quant Hedge Fund High-Flyer Apologizes for Loss (Bloomberg)
China’s top quant hedge fund apologized to investors after a record slump in performance, highlighting challenges facing the industry following a period of breakneck growth. The recent drawdown, caused in part by mistimed trades, was the biggest in the firm’s history, Zhejiang High-Flyer Asset Management said in a statement late Tuesday on its Wechat account. The investment manager didn’t give a number for the decline.
As Cathie Wood’s Funds Struggle, Head of Anti-Ark ETF Says He’s Surprised His Fund—up 8% in December—isn’t Drawing More Flows (Market Watch)
The present travails of ARK Invest founder, Cathie Wood, in the world of exchange-traded funds are no secret. The star investor’s flagship ARK Innovation ETF ARKK, -1.21% is down for the year and notably down 11% so far in December, even as the broader market has enjoyed new records for the S&P500 index. That is, perhaps, why Matthew Tuttle is a bit surprised that an anti-Cathie Wood ETF that was launched back in mid November hasn’t drawn more inflows.
Value Hedge Fund Gains from Past Experience with the Great and the Good (Opalesque)
Shawn Badlani founded Honest Capital LLC in April 2020 and launched a concentrated, long-term, long-biased fund that invests in high-quality North American small and mid-cap equities. By the end of the year, the fund had returned 88%. This outstanding performance, he says, comes from his very own past experience. Before founding Honest Capital, Badlani spent almost a decade as a partner and portfolio manager at Marcato Capital Management in San Francisco, a mid-cap, concentrated, value-focused activist hedge fund with $3bn of AuM at its peak. Before that, he was an investment analyst at Canyon Capital Advisors, a multi-strategy, credit-focused, value hedge fund based in Los Angeles, with about $10bn of AuM at the time. Prior to Canyon, he was an analyst at Blackstone.
Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash
Astrology Fund Predicts Correction In 2022; Says Sell Stocks, Buy Gold (Forbes)
When you get right down to it, stock predictions and market forecasts are just a glorified form of fortune telling. While fundamental analysis is a more educated form of guessing, it’s still guessing. Why not just get rid of all the pretense and go full bore into fortune telling with astrology? That’s what the Astrology Fund does. Henry Weingarten, the fund’s managing director does use fundamental and technical analysis, but he adds astrology as an extra component to his forecasting. He admits he doesn’t get every market surprise, but tries to get 30% of the surprises, which “should be enough to make a lot of money.”
Soros Firm Looks to UBS for New General Counsel Hollenbeck (1) (Bloomberg Law)
Billionaire George Soros’s investment firm reached into UBS Group AG for its new general counsel, Andrew Hollenbeck, who spent a dozen years at various UBS units. Hollenbeck, most recently general counsel for UBS Asset Management Americas Inc., is responsible for all legal, regulatory, and compliance issues at Soros Fund Management, including the oversight of portfolio transactions and family office matters, said Soros spokesman Michael Vachon. Hollenbeck’s hire had not previously been publicly disclosed.
Kornitzer Capital Management Inc. KS Sells 760 Shares of Dollar General Co. (NYSE:DG) (ETF Daily News)
Kornitzer Capital Management Inc. KS trimmed its holdings in shares of Dollar General Co. (NYSE:DG) by 2.2% in the third quarter, HoldingsChannel reports. The institutional investor owned 34,552 shares of the company’s stock after selling 760 shares during the quarter. Kornitzer Capital Management Inc. KS’s holdings in Dollar General were worth $7,330,000 at the end of the most recent quarter.
Wednesday 12/29 Insider Buying Report: NOVA, BNED (Nasdaq.com)
On Tuesday, Sunnova Energy International’s Director, Akbar Mohamed, made a $522,600 buy of NOVA, purchasing 20,000 shares at a cost of $26.13 each. Sunnova Energy International is trading up about 0.9% on the day Wednesday. This buy marks the first one filed by Mohamed in the past year. And at Barnes & Noble Education, there was insider buying on Tuesday, by Director Zachary Levenick who purchased 67,500 shares at a cost of $6.70 each, for a trade totaling $452,075. Before this latest buy, Levenick bought BNED on 8 other occasions during the past year, for a total cost of $2.08M at an average of $7.86 per share. Barnes & Noble Education is trading up about 2.4% on the day Wednesday. Levenick was up about 4.5% on the buy at the high point of today’s trading session, with BNED trading as high as $7.00 in trading on Wednesday.
The Sr. VP, CAO & Treasurer of Saul Centers (NYSE: BFS) is Buying Shares (Analyst Ratings)
Today, the Sr. VP, CAO & Treasurer of Saul Centers (BFS), Joel Albert Friedman, bought shares of BFS for $444.2K. This recent transaction increases Joel Albert Friedman’s holding in the company by 84.21% to a total of $627K. Following Joel Albert Friedman’s last BFS Buy transaction on May 13, 2021, the stock climbed by 11.4%. Based on Saul Centers’ latest earnings report for the quarter ending September 30, the company posted quarterly revenue of $60.26 million and quarterly net profit of $13.14 million.
Elon Musk Owes $11 Billion in Taxes After Wrapping Up His Tesla Stock Sales (CNN Business)
New York (CNN Business) Elon Musk appears to have wrapped up a busy year of trading his Tesla shares Tuesday. He’ll end up with one of the largest tax bills in history to show for it. The Tesla CEO exercised options to buy another 1.6 million shares, and sold 934,090 of those shares for $1 billion to cover the tax bite he’ll be facing on that purchase. The trades completed the exercise of the 22.9 million options he held that were due to expire in August. He sold off 10.3 million of the shares he acquired thoughout the process to cover his tax withholding requirements. And he did it using a pre-arranged plan that allows company insiders to sell shares in such a way that they can’t be accused of trading on insider information.
Interview: Raj Rajaratnam Has A New Book And Is Speaking Out (Forbes)
Raj Rajaratnam, convicted of insider trading charges and now free after more than 7 years in federal prison, has authored a new book, Uneven Justice, about his experience of being prosecuted in the Southern District of New York. Fellow Forbes contributor John Tamny wrote a great piece on the book and Rajaratnam’s case. Rajaratnam gave me an extensive interview where he talked about his book, his life now and reflections on the case that forever changed his life.
CFTC Charges New Jersey-Based Entities and Individuals With Multi-Million Dollar Forex Fraud (HedgeCo.net)
(HedgeCo.Net) The Commodity Futures Trading Commission has announced that it has filed a civil enforcement action in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey against WorldWideMarkets, Ltd., TAB Networks, Inc., Thomas Plaut of Saddle River, N.J., and Arthur Dembro of New York, N.Y., charging them with fraud and other violations. The complaint alleges that the two companies, acting as a common enterprise under Plaut’s control from an office in Woodcliff Lake, N.J., operated a long-running scheme from approximately March 2012 through September 2018 that defrauded retail forex customers worldwide. Dembro, who was the Chief Financial Officer of both companies, is alleged to have aided and abetted the fraud.
