Millennium Takes Second Short Bet Against Smurfit Kappa (Business Post)
Israel ‘Izzy’ Englander, the owner of Millennium Management, has taken another short bet against Smurfit Kappa, the Irish paper and packaging company. Filings with the Central Bank show that Englander’s New York-based hedge fund has taken out a total short position on 0.5 per cent of the company’s shares, worth more than €43 million at the current share price. It is the second major short bet against Smurfit by Millennium in recent months.
Billion-Dollar Hedge Fund Is Betting Against Bitcoin And Grayscale, Not Just USDT (BlockchainTimes.news)
The pressure continues to mount on Grayscale with its Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) and parent company Digital Currency Group. And as Ram Ahluwalia, CEO and co-founder of crypto-native investment advisor Lumida, pointed out in a recent thread, two new characters, Valkyrie Investments and Fir Tree have entered the “Shakespearean drama.” The motivation of the second, in particular, is very dubious. Fir Tree is a hedge fund with about $3 billion in assets under management (AUM) and hundreds of holdings. The SEC 13F filings show that Fir Tree holds First Citizen’s Bank, KKR, Comcast, and hundreds of other securities. They are also large investors in oil and tobacco. Ahluwalia, therefore, raises the question of why Fir Tree, as a value investor, has an interest in GBTC and filed a lawsuit against Grayscale in early December, especially since the hedge fund does not own a lot of GBTC. Fir Tree Capital Management filed the lawsuit seeking information that could be used to force changes to the way the company operates its flagship Bitcoin Trust.
Hedge Fund Losses Transform Tiger Global (Post Guam)
Tiger Global Management started out as a traditional stock-picking hedge fund that dabbled in venture investments. Now, after a tumultuous 2022, its start-up bets outstrip equities more than ever before. That transformation helped the money manager weather its worst year on record, as Tiger Global’s traditional hedge fund lost more than half of its value. Its long-established venture unit grew exponentially over the past two years, insulating the firm from even steeper losses, as such private investments are less susceptible to declines in public equities or the short-term whims of clients.
Pixabay/Public Domain
Gemini’s Cameron Winklevoss Slams Crypto Exec Barry Silbert Over Frozen Funds (Bloomberg)
The fallout from the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto empire just got messier, with digital-asset entrepreneur Cameron Winklevoss accusing fellow businessman Barry Silbert of “bad faith stall tactics” and the intermingling of funds within his conglomerate that Winklevoss says have left $900 million in customer assets needlessly in limbo since FTX’s meltdown. Gemini Trust Co., founded by Winklevoss and his twin brother, paused redemptions on a lending product called Earn, which offered investors the potential to generate as much as 8% in interest on their digital coins. It did so by lending them out to Genesis Global Capital, one of the companies owned by Silbert’s Digital Currency Group.
Opalesque Roundup: Hedge Fund AUM at $4.1tn as of September, Down 4.8%: Hedge Fund News, Week 48 (Opalesque.com)
In the week ending December 30th 2022, a study by Preqin revealed that hedge funds AUM stands at $4.1tn as of September 2022, which represents a 4.8% reduction since the end of 2021. As of September, the asset class had declined by 9.3% (-12.2% annualized). The decline was not slight, but a deep dive into sub-strategies will help us understand how the industry truly performed. Meanwhile a Reuters report said that global hedge funds are set to register their worst returns in 14 years in 2022 after aggressive U.S. interest rate rises hit asset prices hard, however, their declines are overall smaller than the slump seen in equity and bond markets this year. Some hedge fund strategies that put money in commodities and currencies using macro-focused strategies and exploited price differences between related securities outperformed in 2022, handing decent gains to investors.
