Exclusive: Activist Investor Ferrari Targets Environment, Social Laggards with New Fund (Reuters)
LONDON (Reuters) – Activist investor Gianluca Ferrari, who has led campaigns against a string of mid-cap firms, is setting up a fund targeting companies lagging on environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues. Ferrari, who made his name pushing for change at companies including EDP Renovaveis and Retelit as part of Frankfurt-based Shareholder Value Management, said his firm, Clearway Capital, aimed to launch its first fund early in 2021.
Bill Ackman: Beware of Short-Term Market Volatility (MoneyWeek)
Hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman is upbeat on prospects for markets in 2021, with interest rates staying low and infrastructure spending on the cards. But he’s worried about short-term volatility as coronavirus takes its toll on the US population. “We think the next couple of months unfortunately are going to be tragic and very difficult for the globe and for our country [the US] in particular,” he warned his investors earlier this month. So he has revisited a winning strategy from earlier this year, putting on a new trade that will pay out if fears over corporate solvency increase.
Hedge Fund Spat With Vedanta Shines Spotlight on Jersey Unit (Bloomberg)
A recent tussle between a hedge fund and Indian mining giant Vedanta Ltd. is spotlighting growing scrutiny of a unit based in the British crown dependency of Jersey. That entity is Cairn India Holdings Ltd. (CIHL). Vedanta’s shareholder, hedge fund Kyma Capital, said earlier this month that a $956 million loan from Vedanta Ltd. to its holding company Vedanta Resources Ltd. — channeled through CIHL — represented an “improper transfer of value.”
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Inside Millennium Management’s Sprawling Network of Hedge Fund Spin-Offs (Business Insider)
One could argue that Millennium Management‘s greatest advantage over other hedge funds is its ability to keep talented people in-house. The massive hedge fund – which manages some $46 billion in assets across hundreds of teams – has a unique structure that lets portfolio managers operate in independent silos. The setup, which is grants PMs even more autonomy than fellow multi-strategy funds though with tight risk and loss parameters, helps billionaire founder Israel Englander convince staffers who might leave a more traditional fund to stay in-house – and recruit top talent into his firm.
Is the Mets’ New Owner Funny? An Investigation (The Baltimore Sun)
For a decade, Carlo Cerilli has been telling every New York Mets employee he encountered that the team ought to mark the spot in the parking lot where Cleon Jones caught the final out of the 1969 World Series at Shea Stadium. He had all but given up hope that anyone was listening. That was, until he had an encounter on Twitter with Steven Cohen, the new owner of the team. “I like that one,” Cohen wrote in a reply to Cerilli on Cohen’s newly verified Twitter account. After recovering from the shock that Cohen had actually replied to him, Cerilli thought to himself, “Finally, someone gets it.”
