Ackman’s London-Listed Pershing Square Gets Its Own Activist (Bloomberg)
Bill Ackman’s publicly-traded Pershing Square Holdings Ltd. has an activist of its own. Asset Value Investors Ltd., or AVI, which owns a 3% stake in the London-listed firm, is pushing back against Pershing Square Holdings’ decision to issue $400 million of 20-year debt without consulting shareholders.
RA Capital Management Closes $308m Venture Capital Fund (Opalesque.com)
Boston-based RA Capital Management said that it had closed its inaugural venture fund, RA Capital Nexus Fund (Nexus), at $308m to target life science investing. The multi-stage investment manager dedicated to evidence-based investing in public and private healthcare and life science companies said in a press note that the new fund boosts its private deal capacity to nearly $1bn and total assets under management to about $2.5bn. Nexus is expected to participate in substantially all investments in private companies made by RA Capital alongside its main, longstanding fund, RA Capital Healthcare Fund.
Pressmaster/Shutterstock.com
Self-made Billionaire and Presidential Hopeful Tom Steyer’s Investing Rule: Don’t be Greedy (CNBC)
Presidential hopeful Tom Steyer founded hedge fund Farallon Capital Management, the success of which made him a billionaire. And Steyer, who declared his candidacy for President of the United States on July 9, lead the firm guided by a North Star principle that might seem surprising: Don’t be greedy. “When we thought about investing, our rule was it’s really important not to be greedy,” Steyer said on the podcast The Forbes Interview in 2017. “So we were always trying to be honest and not take huge risks and to understand the risks we were taking.”
Steve Cohen’s Point72 Loses Long-Tenured Money Managers (The Wall Street Journal)
About 20 portfolio managers have left Steven A. Cohen’s hedge-fund firm this year, including several who worked with Mr. Cohen for more than a decade, according to people familiar with the matter. It is an unusual level of turnover for Mr. Cohen’s firm and marks the latest developments in the rocky relaunch of his fund. The 63-year-old billionaire investor launched Point72 Asset Management last year after an insider-trading scandal left him barred him from managing outside money until 2018.
Hedge Fund Performance Update: June 2019 (Preqin)
In this factsheet, we present the hedge fund performance benchmarks for June 2019. Plus, the 2019 YTD and 12-month return figures across all top-level strategies, structures, denominations and size classifications. The Preqin All-Strategies Hedge Fund benchmark made a return to positive gains in June, generating 2.15% for the month. All fund structures and top-level strategies posted positive returns in June, reversing industry-wide underperformance in May. JPY-denominated hedge funds were the only currency to make a loss for the month.
Evira Avoids Fallen Angels to Make Top Performers List (Hedge Nordic)
Stockholm (HedgeNordic) – Equity funds dominate this year’s list of top performing hedge funds in the Nordics, as equity markets have been roaring ahead to new highs. There is one fixed income hedge fund that managed to sneak into the top five list of high performers. That fund is Nykredit EVIRA, which booked a gain of 21.4 percent in the first half of 2019. Nykredit EVIRA is a hedge fund “dedicated to run a leveraged portfolio on corporate credit, primarily single names, no credit default swaps (CDSs),” according to Nicolai Kjer Rasmussen, chief portfolio manager at Nykredit Asset Management.
Hedge Funds Up 1.83 per cent in June, Says Eurekahedge (HedgeWeek.com)
The Eurekahedge Hedge Fund Index was up 1.83 per cent in June, bringing its year-to-date return to 5.84 per cent, according to the July2019 edition of the Eurekahedge report. Roughly 24.7 per cent of the hedge fund managers comprising the index have recorded double-digit gains over the first half of the year. The global hedge fund industry AUM has grown by USD2.0 billion as of June 2019 year-to-date. Preliminary Q2 2019 net outflows figure stood at USD23.8 billion, as investor redemptions continued to slow down. Hedge fund managers recorded USD46.4 billion and USD94.7 billion of net outflows in Q1 2019 and Q4 2018 respectively.
New Hedge Fund on OPIM Platform Seeks to Tap Into China’s Arbitrage Opportunities (Opalesque.com)
OP Investment Management (OPIM), Asia’s leading hedge fund platform, is launching Heqi Global Absolute Return Fund SP with Qijian Global Investment Management. The fund is Cayman-domiciled and for professional investors. It focuses on the China A-Shares market, using fundamental and market data to apply statistical arbitrage models for medium to high-frequency long positions. It also seeks to minimize systematic risks by hedging swaps and index futures. The holding period for equities and futures can range from a few seconds to as long as a few weeks.
