Dan Loeb on His Top Winning Plays and How He Dodged the GameStop Short Squeeze (CNBC)
Third Point’s Dan Loeb, who finished 2020 with a solid 20% return, said his hedge fund was able to dodge steep losses caused by the GameStop speculative trading mania that burned some of his peers. The hedge fund manager also revealed his top performers in the fourth quarter that propelled the fund to the good year, according to his latest investor letter obtained by CNBC.
Hedge Fund Indaba Pushes Benefitfocus to Put Itself Up for Sale (Reuters)
BOSTON (Reuters) – Indaba Capital is pushing benefit management software company Benefitfocus Inc. to put itself up for sale after years of poor returns and high turnover in the executive suite, according to a letter the hedge fund sent to the company’s board on Thursday. Indaba, which owns 9.6% of Benefitfocus’ stock, is dialing up the pressure after weeks of private negotiations that ended when the company last month named a new director and said an independent chairman will be appointed at the annual meeting.
Bitcoin Bull Mike Novogratz Compared Dogecoin to GameStop – and Warned Buyers could ‘Lose Lots of Money’ (Business Insider)
The Dogecoin craze started as a joke, but so many people have invested in the cryptocurrency that serious cash is now on the line, Mike Novogratz told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” this week. “Dogecoin reminds me a lot of GameStop,” the Galaxy Digital CEO and founder said. “It was funny for a little bit, but now it’s at a market valuation where people are going to lose lots of money in Doge.”
Rawpixel / shutterstock.com
Famed Hedge Fund Firm CQS Is Surviving — But Not Because of Its Hedge Funds (Institutional Investor)
For a man whose flagship hedge fund was down more than 50 percent at one point last year, Michael Hintze sounds surprisingly upbeat. On a chilly winter afternoon, Hintze, 67, phones from London to talk about his firm’s reckoning this past spring, a time when the flagship fund’s structured credit instruments went terribly, horribly wrong and the firm’s positioning amid market turmoil sent that and one other fund plummeting to their worst-ever losses – wiping out billions of assets in mere weeks.
Ackman, Griffin, Coleman Are Among Hedge Fund Bigwigs Who Cleaned Up in 2020 (AI-CIO.com)
Some hedge funds might have run into rough sledding in early 2021 in the winter storm over GameStop, when their shorting attempts failed. But in 2020, the top hedge operators romped, especially for their own bank accounts. The 15 leading hedge fund honchos personally collected $23.2 billion last year, according to Bloomberg’s annual estimates. After all, a year like that, with the stock market’s dizzying fall and rise, along with gut-wrenching volatility throughout, is a target-rich environment for adept hedge funds.
Ray Dalio on Why Bitcoin is Zooming and Why it Faces Hurdles as an Alternative Asset (MSN)
Bitcoin is the talk of the global financial markets as the digital currency is seeing a huge trading frenzy. With Tesla acquiring $1.5 billion of the cryptocurrency, Bitcoin’s price has zoomed into the stratosphere. One Bitcoin is now worth about $45,500, higher by 57% in 2021; even more than 25 ounces of gold. Just before the pandemic struck in March last year, the digital currency was trading even below $5,000.
