Third Point Tells United Technologies that it Opposes Raytheon Merger (Reuters)
BOSTON (Reuters) – Billionaire investor Daniel Loeb said on Friday that his hedge fund Third Point LLC will vote against the planned merger of United Technologies Corp (UTX.N) and Raytheon Co (RTN.N), saying there is no “strategic rationale for this transaction.” “We have concluded that the proposed combination of United Technologies and Raytheon is ill-conceived and unlikely to create value for UTC shareholders,” Loeb wrote in a letter to the board of directors at United Technologies. Reuters saw a copy of the letter.
Feel Free to Laugh at Hedge Fund, Autonomy’s CEO Told Executive (Bloomberg)
Autonomy executives were struggling to deal with probing questions from analysts and hedge funds about the company’s finances when one official had enough. “These guys are more annoying than gum on your shoe,” Harald Collet complained in an email to his embattled boss Mike Lynch about hedge fund Lone Pine Capital.
Saba Can Nominate Slate to BlackRock Fund Boards, Delaware Court Says (The Wall Street Journal)
Saba Capital Management LP, a $1.7 billion hedge fund, will be allowed to nominate outsiders to the boards of two BlackRock Inc. closed-end funds. The decision by Delaware Chancery Court comes after Saba filed a lawsuit against the world’s largest asset manager earlier this month. In Thursday’s ruling, the court said that the BlackRock funds had overstepped their authority when they demanded extensive information about the dissidents’ backgrounds ahead of the funds’ annual meetings.
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Czech Billionaire Claims First Round in Fight With New York Fund (Bloomberg)
Czech property billionaire Radovan Vitek is claiming victory in the first round of a transatlantic legal fight with New York hedge fund Kingstown Capital Management, which alleges he engineered a $1 billion fraud scheme. A Luxembourg court became the first to weigh in this month by dismissing Kingstown’s 2015 claim against Vitek’s CPI Property Group, the largest commercial property landlord in Berlin, saying in its ruling it wasn’t clear why the company should be “condemned” with the other defendants.
‘Pain is a Great Teacher’: How Ray Dalio, the World’s Most Successful (and Mysterious) Hedge-fund Founder, Came Back from Financial Ruin (Business Insider)
Ray Dalio is one of the most influential figures in the world of finance. He started Bridgewater Associates out of his apartment in 1975, and grew it into the world’s largest hedge fund. It now has $150 billion in assets under management. Over his career, the billionaire investor has become well known for his unusual management style, rooted in what he calls “radical transparency.” At Bridgewater’s Connecticut office, employees use iPads to rate each other’s performance in real time.
New Hedge Fund Launches on the Rise (Opalesque.com)
New hedge fund launches increased to begin 2019, climbing to 136 in Q1, an increase over the 111 launches in the volatile 4Q18, according to the latest HFR Market Microstructure Report. According to the report, the 136 new launches brings the rolling 12-month launch total to 544, falling below the 561 launches from calendar year 2018 and representing the lowest total for a 12-month period since 2000. 1Q19 also represents the third consecutive quarter in which liquidations exceeded launches, reversing what had previously been a four-quarter trend of net growth in the number of funds. Fund liquidations were steady in 1Q19, narrowly declining to an estimated 213, in line with the 215 liquidations from 4Q18.
Technologists Becoming Ever-closer Partners to Hedge Funds (Hedge Week)
One of the key benefits of the platform-as-a-service model is that it gives smaller and emerging hedge funds the chance to utilise industrial-strength technology tools and applications that are commonly afforded to only the industry’s largest management groups. Siepe, a leading provider of data management and IT solutions, was founded in 2012 and has evolved to offer investment management solutions – spanning portfolio management analytics, performance attribution and data warehousing – and managed IT cloud services to empower hedge funds to scale quickly and efficiently, in lockstep with AUM growth.
