Hedge Fund and Insider Trading News: Cliff Asness, Steven Cohen, Ray Dalio, Albar Capital, AlarmCom Hldg Inc (ALRM), Danaher Corporation (DHR), and More

Albar Capital Automates Position Reconciliations with Fund Recs (Hedge Week)
Albar Capital, a London based absolute return Investment Manager, has gone live on Fund Recs Velocity platform to automate position reconciliations. Velocity is a set of cloud-based software modules that helps investment managers, global fund administrators and auditors to achieve straight through reconciliations and data processing in their middle and back offices. Rajesh Krishnan, Head of Operations at Albar Capital, says: “We are delighted to partner with Fund Recs to implement Velocity to automate our position reconciliations. Velocity has made our team more efficient by eliminating manual processes, reducing risk of errors and ensuring automation throughout our reconciliation process.”

Billionaire Cliff Asness Says that Going Through Value-Investing Hell has Only Made Him More Confident – and Shares the Advice He’d Give His Younger Self (Business Insider)
Value investors, those who seek out stocks that trade at cheaper prices than what financial analysts would expect given a company’s revenue or scale, have had a rough couple of years. But that hasn’t deterred Cliff Asness, the billionaire cofounder of AQR. On a new podcast from Newfound Research, Asness tells host Corey Hoffstein that value’s “hell” has only made him more confident in the factor — and his firm is even committing a “sin” by trying to time factors by tilting more toward value, and away from momentum, or stocks that have recently gone up.

Point72 Closing to New Money After Raising $10 Billion (Pensions&Investments)
Steven A. Cohen‘s Point72 Asset Management told clients it will close to new investments next month, after raising $10 billion since it started managing outside capital less than three years ago. Point72 was one of the biggest launches of 2018, when Mr. Cohen returned to the industry after a two-year ban from managing other people’s money. His prior firm, SAC Capital Advisors, pleaded guilty to securities fraud and paid a $1.8 billion fine. Mr. Cohen wasn’t charged with wrongdoing.

Countries with the Smallest Government Per Capita in the World

Pressmaster/Shutterstock.com

Bridgewater Faces Losses and a Lawsuit (The Economist)
We’ve made more money for our clients than any other hedge fund in existence,” declared Ray Dalio, the founder of Bridgewater Associates, the world’s largest hedge-fund manager, in 2017. In early 2020 Bridgewater was head and shoulders above the rest, having made $58.5bn, net of fees, for its clients since the firm’s inception in 1975. Mr Dalio is worth $17bn, making him one of the richest people in the world. He stepped back from running the firm in 2017, but it has been shaped by his deep economic analysis, and his unorthodox management style, which he calls “radical transparency”.

Hedge Funds: Boaz Weinstein’s Saba Capital Up 90% (DailyAlts.com)
Saba Projects Continuing Gains: Hedge fund industry observers are buzzing of Saba Capital Management’s purported sharp gains, in addition to the firm’s projections of seeing additional returns of this caliber in the months ahead. Boaz Weinstein, founder of Saba, shares that “Markets are at an unstable place right now. I look out at the next five months, and there are lots of known unknowns.” Weinstein describes his strategy largely as identifying price dislocations in derivative securities. These securities are often implemented as a hedge against bond defaults.

Hedge Fund Manager Fails In Effort To The Renege On Charitable Deal With Ex-Wife (Deal Breaker)
Divorce isn’t known to bring out the best in people. And in some cases, it brings out the pure blind animus that animates certain Martin Lawrence movies. This seems the only possible explanation of Cooper vs. Hohn, formerly Cooper-Hohn vs. Cooper-Hohn. You see, after Jamie Cooper cured her husband Chris Hohn of being a bastard, he founded a hedge fund that pledged one-third of its management fee income to a charity dedicated to helping children, hence it’s not-at-all-creepy name: The Children’s Investment Fund. Some years back, he stopped doing this, ostensibly because it had enough money to solve all problems faced by children, although coincidental evidence suggests it had more to do with the fact that the Cooper-Hohns were going to go back to being Cooper and Hohn.

Man Group Assets Fall 8% Amid ‘Challenging Time’ (Reuters)
LONDON (Reuters) – British hedge fund manager Man Group (EMG.L) recorded an 8% fall in assets in the first six months of 2020 as the new coronavirus pandemic dragged down performance by $5.4 billion (4.16 billion pounds). Man Group’s total assets under management at the end of June fell to $108.3 billion from $117.7 billion on December 31. On top of performance losses, assets were hindered by negative currency movements of $2.8 billion and net outflows of $1.2 billion.

Muted Appetite for Hedge Funds (Hedge Nordic)
Stockholm (HedgeNordic) – Hedge funds recouped the losses incurred in February and March after a strong second quarter, but hedge fund investors are not in a hurry to commit fresh capital. About two-thirds of hedge fund mandates issued by allocators in the second quarter were for total commitments of less than $50 million, writes Preqin. There were no mandates issued for investments of $300 million or more, down from nine percent in the first quarter. “Hedge funds were buoyed by a general market bounceback in Q2, and were able to wipe out losses incurred in Q1,” Christopher Beales, Hedge Fund Spokesperson, said in a statement.

Hedge Fund Manager And Biden Advisor Is Shorting Uber On Coming Regulatory Pressures (Moguldom.com)
Renowned shortseller Jim Chanos’ funds made almost $100 million by shorting German payments company Wirecard ahead of its collapse. The company filed for bankruptcy after a five-year Financial Times investigation into its accounting practices. A giant in the global hedge fund industry, Chanos is president and founder of New York-based Kynikos Associates, named after the ancient Greek word for “cynic”. His pitch is that he can identify corporate disasters-in-the-making, Harriet Agnew wrote for Financial Times. His 20 employees manage $1.5 billon in assets. Chanos also teaches a course on the history of financial fraud dating back to the 17th century (“how to detect it, not how to commit it”) at his alma mater, Yale University. And this right now is “the golden age of fraud”, Chanos told FT.

Alarm.com Holdings Inc (ALRM) President and CEO Stephen Trundle Sold $13.5 million of Shares (Guru Focus)
President and CEO of Alarm.com Holdings Inc., Stephen Trundle., sold 200,000 shares of ALRM on 07/28/2020 at an average price of $67.27 a share. The total sale was $13.5 million. Alarm.com Holdings Inc is a cloud-based software platform solution for the connected property. The company through its cloud-based services makes connected home technology accessible to home and business owners.

Thursday 7/30 Insider Buying Report: FBIZ, NRZ (Nasdaq.com)
On Tuesday, First Business Financial Services’s Director, Gerald L. Kilcoyne, made a $100,300 purchase of FBIZ, buying 6,800 shares at a cost of $14.75 a piece. First Business Financial Services is trading up about 3.9% on the day Thursday. And on Monday, Director Alan L. Tyson bought $77,184 worth of New Residential Investment, buying 10,000 shares at a cost of $7.72 a piece. Before this latest buy, Tyson made one other purchase in the past year, buying $50,100 shares at a cost of $5.01 each. New Residential Investment is trading off about 1.9% on the day Thursday. So far Tyson is in the green, up about 4.9% on their buy based on today’s trading high of $8.10.

The President & CEO of Danaher is Exercising Options (Analyst Ratings)
Yesterday it was reported that the President & CEO of Danaher (DHR), Thomas Patrick Joyce, exercised options to sell 181,394 DHR shares at $65.89 a share, for a total transaction value of $35.19M. Following Thomas Patrick Joyce’s last DHR Sell transaction on February 11, 2020, the stock climbed by 35.7%. In addition to Thomas Patrick Joyce, 2 other DHR executives reported Sell trades in the last month.

Medpace Holdings Inc (MEDP) President & CEO August J. Troendle Sold $30.5 million of Shares (Guru Focus)
President & CEO of Medpace Holdings Inc., August J. Troendle, sold 243,518 shares of MEDP on 07/28/2020 at an average price of $125.23 a share. The total sale was $30.5 million. Medpace Holdings Inc is a clinical contract research organisation. It is engaged in providing scientifically-driven clinical research-based drug and medical device development services to the biotechnology, pharmaceutical and medical device industries.

Ebony Magazine Files Two Suits Against Jacob Walthour and Blueprint Capital Alleging Insider Trading (RadioFacts)
Ebony Owners File SEC Complaint and also move to halt bankruptcy citing Walthour as insider. Digital and Radio Facts: During these unprecedented times, while black businesses are getting hit from all fronts, including the struggles brought on by COVID-19; black men and women are fighting to preserve their livelihoods, all while dealing with the racial unrests, as many have taken to the streets to exclaim “Black Lives Matter!” Ebony owners claim, for Blueprint Capital (“BPC”) CRD# 282327 and Co-Founder Jacob Walthour, it has been an opportunity for financial gain and driving black legacy businesses like Ebony Magazine into bankruptcy.