Stock Hedge Funds Erase Billions With Another Year of Losses (Bloomberg)
Back-to-back declines reach more than 40% at some firms. Whale Rock, Light Street and Perceptive among big losers. In 2020, tech-heavy hedge fund Light Street Capital Management posted a banner year on bets including Amazon.com Inc. and Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. That was the last of the good times. The firm, along with other once-high-flying stock hedge funds, is coming off a second year of losses that erased billions of dollars in clients’ wealth.
Hedge Funder Pokes Fun At Cathie Wood, Expects ‘Million Bazillion Percent’ Returns With His Strategy (Benzinga)
Clifford Asness, co-founder and manager of the hedge fund AQR capital management, called out ARK Invest founder Cathie Wood for her prediction regarding artificial intelligence’s impact on the U.S.’s gross domestic product. Wood tweeted back in May 2022 that AGI (artificial general intelligence) would help increase the GDP by a staggering 30-50% per year. For context, last year’s GDP was $23 trillion. A 50% increase would bring us well above $34 trillion. It’s unclear exactly how Wood ended up at the 30-50% increase in GDP number, but it does sound outlandish at first site.
Doug Kass Predicted Some of the Biggest Surprises of 2022: Here’s His 2023 List (The Street)
Hedge fund manager keeps his 21-year tradition of penning top surprises for the new year. Will gold climb to $3,000 an ounce by late next year? Will the forecast for a first-half-of-2023 downturn and a second-half upturn be flipped on its head? Will oil make a surprise rally in the second half of the year? Those would all be big surprises, right? But shouldn’t we be used to surprises by now? Shouldn’t we even be bracing for them? Indeed, as we say goodbye to 2022, one thing is clear: It was a year of “boundless surprises.”
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Macro Hedge Funds on Course for Record Year as Others Struggle (Hedge Week)
This year’s big interest rises have set bond and currency trading macro hedge funds on course to record their best annual gains since the global financial crisis in 2008, according to a report by the Financial Times. The same interest rates rises though, have caused major problems for equity specialists and mainstream investors. Billionaire trader Chris Rokos, who recovered from losses last year to gain 45.5 per cent in 2022, is among the year’s big macro winners, with the Brevan Howard co-founder on track for his best year since launching his own fund, which now has $15.5 billion in assets, in 2015.
Sam Bankman-Fried Borrowed $546 Million from his Hedge Fund to Buy a Robinhood Stake (CNN)
When Sam Bankman-Fried bought a nearly 7.6% stake in Robinhood, the popular stock-trading app, earlier this year, he financed the deal with more than half a billion dollars borrowed from his own hedge fund — the entity that prosecutors say was illegally funneling customer funds from its affiliated platform, FTX. In an affidavit that emerged Tuesday, Bankman-Fried said he and FTX co-founder Gary Wang borrowed more than $546 million from the hedge fund, Alameda Research, which they used to purchase the Robinhood shares via a holding company primarily controlled by Bankman-Fried.
Hedge Funds Could Benefit From An Improving Environment For Alpha In 2023 (Forbes)
It’s been a challenging year for virtually all asset classes, including most alternatives. Although many hedge funds were in the red for 2022, much of the industry demonstrated their value to investors by protecting their capital. Expectations for hedge fund performance in 2023 look similar to 2022’s results, although with slightly higher returns expected. In their “2023 Long-Term Capital Market Assumptions,” JPMorgan Asset Management said they have “moderately” increased their projections for hedge fund returns in 2023.
Hedge Fund and CTA Assets Continued to Shrink in October (Opalesque.com)
Opalesque Industry Update – October redemptions from hedge funds outpaced subscriptions by -$52.97 billion, resulting in a -1.12% contraction of industry assets, according to the BarclayHedge Fund Flow Indicator. This followed September’s net redemption figure of -$48.59 billion which was heretofore the largest net outflow for the calendar year 2022. October’s outflows cap an unbroken trend of hedge fund redemptions dating back to February which has reclaimed nearly $268 billion from the industry. A $71.03 billion trading profit during the month brought total hedge fund industry assets to more than $4.74 trillion as October ended.
Investment Funds II — Hedge Funds (DataDrivenInvestor.com)
In my last post on investment funds, I talked about what investment funds are, and about two common types of investment funds: mutual funds, and exchange-traded funds, or ETFs. In this post I’m going to continue my previous discussion on funds and delve into hedge funds. Hedge Funds: While ETFs and mutual funds were similar, a hedge fund has a significantly different structure from anything I’ve discussed thus far. Hedge funds first came into being in 1949 and Australian investor, Alfred Winslow Jones, is credited with their development.
Wednesday 12/28 Insider Buying Report: ZS (Nasdaq.com)
At Zscaler, there was insider buying on Friday, by Director Andrew William Fraser Brown who bought 5,000 shares at a cost of $108.78 each, for a trade totaling $543,900. This purchase marks the first one filed by Brown in the past twelve months. Zscaler is trading up about 0.3% on the day Wednesday.
Campbell Soup And 3 Other Stocks Insiders Are Selling (Benzinga)
Campbell Soup: The Trade: Campbell Soup Company (CPB) Executive Vice President Adam Ciongoli sold a total of 37,354 shares at an average price of $56.86. The insider received around $2.12 million as a result of the transaction. Toll Brothers: The Trade: Toll Brothers, Inc. (TOL) CFO Martin Connor sold a total of 10,000 shares at an average price of $51.26. The insider received around $512.61 thousand from selling those shares.
Jury Convicts Fremont Man of Insider Trading Scheme at Palo Alto Networks (SanjoseInside.com)
A federal jury in San Francisco has convicted Sivannarayana Barama, a former IT professional at multiple Silicon Valley technology firms, of four counts of securities fraud for using confidential inside information about Palo Alto Network’s financial performance to trade in the company’s securities. United States Attorney Stephanie M. Hinds and Federal Bureau of Investigation Special Agent in Charge Robert K. Tripp announced the guilty verdicts that came at the end of a one-week trial before Chief United States District Judge Richard Seeborg.
Insider Trading Convictions Over Healthcare Leaks are Voided by U.S. Appeals Court (Reuters)
A divided federal appeals court on Tuesday threw out the insider trading convictions of four defendants, including two former hedge fund partners, over leaks from a U.S. healthcare agency about planned changes to Medicare reimbursement rates. In a 2-1 decision, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan dismissed fraud and theft charges against former Deerfield Management Co partners Theodore Huber and Robert Olan, former U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) employee Christopher Worrall, and David Blaszczak, the founder of political consulting firm Precipio Health Strategies.
