Hedge Fund and Insider Trading News: Eddie Lampert, Citadel Investment Group, Point72, Axon Enterprise Inc (AAXN), Strongbridge Biopharma PLC (SBBP), and More

Eddie Lampert Wants to Save Sears but Mall Owners Say Don’t Bother (The Wall Street Journal)
Shopping center owners usually dread the prospect of a big retail operator shutting its doors. In the case of Sears Holding Corp., many landlords are welcoming it. That is in large part because these owners have lost faith in Sears chairman Eddie Lampert, his plans to salvage the company and a brand that they view as outdated, many big landlords and retail analysts say.

Citadel Hedge Fund Gains 9% in Strong Multi-Strategy Year (Bloomberg)
Big multi-strategy hedge funds found a way to make money in a tumultuous year when so many other firms floundered. Ken Griffin’s Citadel, which runs more than $30 billion, rose 9.1 percent in its flagship Wellington hedge fund last year, and Izzy Englander’s $35 billion Millennium Management gained nearly 5 percent, according to people familiar with the matter. Hudson Bay Capital Management, which manages $3 billion, returned 6.5 percent, another person said.

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What Regular Investors Can Learn from Bridgewater’s Stellar 2018 Performance (MarketWatch)
Bridgewater Associate’s Pure Alpha Strategy fund, benefiting from what billionaire founder Ray Dalio described as a “Goldilocks period” for the stock market, crushed the competition last year with a 14.6% gain. That’s a period in which the S&P 500 SPX, +0.18% lost 4.4%, and the average hedge fund lost 6.7%. Winners were, indeed, a rarity. Dalio didn’t get into the details of his outperformance, but he did share this “one important thought” in a LinkedIn post on Monday: ‘If you are worried when the stock market goes down and happy when it goes up, it probably indicates that your portfolio is unbalanced. If your income is also tied to how the economy does, you are doubly at risk because your portfolio can go down when your income is worst, which is scary.’

Why this Hedge Fund is Bullish on China (CNBC)
Marc Desmidt of Point72 says there are “fantastic” opportunities to deploy capital in China, and he is “excited” to tap into the health care, financial services and education sectors in the country.

Hedge Funds Lost Almost 6% Last Year as Markets Roiled Managers (Bloomberg)
Hedge funds posted a loss of 5.7 percent last year as managers struggled to capitalize on volatility and were roiled by political uncertainty. For December, funds lost 1.9 percent, according to preliminary figures from the Bloomberg Hedge Fund Database.