Pernod Gets the Gentle Treatment From New York Hedge Fund (Bloomberg)
Billionaire Paul Singer is often portrayed as every CEO’s worst nightmare. His hedge fund Elliott Management Corp. is known for aggressive activist campaigns that put boardrooms under pressure to make radical changes, or get swept aside. But his latest European bet, on French liquor-maker Pernod Ricard SA, is different. It’s a more back-seat, common-sense approach that advocates tweaks rather than a structural overhaul. Judging by the recent board changes at the company and the share-price rise, it is working out for Elliott and Pernod’s management.
Just Eat Shareholder Wants Merger with Rival Instead of Hunt for CEO (The Guardian)
Just Eat, the British online takeaway service, has come under fresh pressure from an activist investor, which is calling for it to merge with a rival rather than appoint a new chief executive. Cat Rock Capital Management, a US hedge fund that owns a 1.9% stake in Just Eat, sent an open letter to its board to demand a merger with another online food delivery company within the next few months. It expressed “deep concern regarding the board’s recent appointment of executives who lack online food delivery experience to critical roles at the company, repeating the mistake the board made by appointing Peter Plumb as CEO.”
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A Rarity on Wall Street: A Female- and Minority-Led Activist Hedge Fund (The Wall Street Journal)
The upper ranks of hedge funds are almost exclusively white and male. Impactive Capital LP, a new activist fund being launched by two industry veterans, will be one of the exceptions. Its co-founders and managing partners are Christian Asmar, who is Hispanic, and Lauren Taylor Wolfe. Both spent roughly a decade at activist hedge fund Blue Harbour Group LP before leaving to strike out on their own.
Hedge Funds will Spend $2 billion on Web-scraping Software to Gain an Edge, and It’s Part of an Investing Gold Rush (Business Insider)
Hedge funds and asset managers scraping the web for investment purposes represented 5% of all Internet traffic in 2018, and is expected to increase rapidly. As investors look for new ways to beat the market, total spending on web scraping for investment purposes is expected to exceed $1.8 billion by 2020. Despite information pouring in from billions of websites, poor performance plagued the hedge fund industry in 2018 — pushing investment managers to increase their already-massive web scraping programs.
Harvard Picks Ex-Hedge Fund Manager, California Judge for Board (Bloomberg)
Harvard University selected former hedge fund manager Timothy Barakett and California Supreme Court Justice Mariano-Florentino Cuellar for its 13-member governing board. Barakett closed his hedge fund, Atticus Capital LP, in the aftermath of the global financial panic in 2010. At its peak, the fund had $20 billion in assets. Since it shut he has been overseeing his family’s money at TRB Advisors. He played a prominent role in Harvard’s fundraising campaign that ended last year and is an alumnus of both the university and the business school, according to a press release Monday.
Insider Weekends: Chairman Of Kinder Morgan Steps Up Insider Purchases (Seeking Alpha)
Insider buying more than doubled again last week. Notable insider buys: Kinder Morgan, Inc., Post Holdings, Inc., Archer Daniels Midland Company, Unifi, Inc., and Zimmer Biomet Holdings, Inc. Notable insider sales: Texas Instruments Incorporated, Palo Alto Networks, Inc., Vertex Pharmaceuticals Incorporated, CarGurus, Inc., and Zscaler, Inc. Insider buying more than doubled again last week with insiders purchasing $79.47 million of stock compared to $37.61 million in the week prior. Selling also increased with insiders selling $1.51 billion of stock last week compared to $831.23 million in the week prior.
Lunchtime Tip on Queensland Copper Find Proves Costly for CEO Convicted of Insider Trading (TheWest.com.au)
A company director who bought $27,000 of shares for his superannuation fund after a luncheon which heard confidential information of a copper find in Queensland has been jailed for nine months for insider trading. Darren James Lind, 47, was today sentenced in the South Australian District Court to 18 months’ imprisonment, though Justice Joanne Tracey ordered he be released after nine months on a $1000, three-year good behaviour bond. Lind was convicted in August after a two-week trial of two counts of insider trading in shares in Minotaur Exploration nearly five years ago.
Monday 2/11 Insider Buying Report: POST, ZBH (Nasdaq.com)
As the saying goes, there are many possible reasons for an insider to sell a stock, but only one reason to buy – they expect to make money. So let’s look at two noteworthy recent insider buys. At Post Holdings (POST), a filing with the SEC revealed that on Wednesday, Director William P. Stiritz bought 134,059 shares of POST, at a cost of $96.71 each, for a total investment of $12.96M. So far Stiritz is in the green, up about 4.6% on their buy based on today’s trading high of $101.16. Post Holdings is trading up about 1.8% on the day Monday. Before this latest buy, Stiritz made one other purchase in the past twelve months, buying $7.2M shares at a cost of $71.99 a piece.
Insider Buys Of The Week: ADM, AT&T, JPMorgan And More (Benzinga)
Insider buying can be an encouraging signal for potential investors. Several board members made notable share purchases in the past week. That includes the executive chair of an energy infrastructure leader. Conventional wisdom says that insiders and 10 percent owners really only buy shares of a company for one reason — they believe the stock price will rise and they want to profit from it. So insider buying can be an encouraging signal for potential investors, particularly during periods of uncertainty. Here’s a look at a few significant insider purchases reported in the past week, and note that a beneficial owner also made sizable purchases of Seagate Technology PLC STX 0.87% shares.
Insider Trading Exposed By Whistleblower Tips and New Technology (The National Law Review)
The SEC Continues to Root Out Insider Trading: Insider trading occurs when an individual buys or sells a security, in breach of a fiduciary duty or other relationship of trust and confidence, while in possession of material, nonpublic information about the security. The SEC continues to focus its enforcement efforts on identifying and halting insider trading violations. Annually, the SEC brings a significant number of its enforcement actions against individuals who: tip material, nonpublic information; trade securities based on tipped information; or trade securities based on misappropriated information.
