Hedge Fund Glenview Used ‘Medicare-for-All’ Rout to Build Up Health Stakes (Bloomberg)
U.S. health-care investor Glenview Capital Management LLC boosted its positions in health insurers and hospitals as the sectors came under pressure from political headlines in the first few months of the year. Glenview Capital added to its holdings of Cigna Corp, Anthem Inc. and Humana Inc., while taking new stakes in Centene Corp. and Wellcare Health Plans Inc., which announced plans to merge at the end of March. Among hospitals, the New York-based hedge fund bought more shares of Tenet Healthcare Corp. and Universal Health Services Inc., its latest 13-F filings show. Glenview remains Tenet’s largest shareholder.
Hedge Fund With Harvard Ties Shutting Down (The Wall Street Journal)
A hedge fund with ties to Harvard University’s endowment is closing down after roughly two years, said people familiar with the matter. Boston-based Cambridge Square Capital LP has delivered roughly flat performance since it started, the people said. Harvard invested more than $200 million with the firm, they said.
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Hedge-Fund Billionaires Were Democrats’ Main Bankrollers in 2018 (Prospect.org)
In the 2018 midterms, Democrats benefited more than Republicans from election spending by outside groups for the first time in recent history. Now, thanks to a new report from Public Citizen, we have a better understanding of where much of that money backing Democrats came from: wealthy individuals who earn their livings as hedge-fund founders, bank executives, and other key positions in the financial industry. The report, named “Plutocrat Politics: How Financial Sector Wealth Fuels Political Ad Spending” and authored by Public Citizen’s Alan Zibel, analyzed the 100 individuals who gave the most money to outside political spending groups in the 2018 cycle and found that about half of that money came from people with financial industry backgrounds.
Hedge Funds up 1.21% in April with Only a Handful of Sectors in the Red (Opalesque.com)
Hedge funds extended their run of positive returns to four straight months in April, returning 1.21% for the month, according to the Barclay Hedge Fund Index. BarclayHedge, a division of Backstop Solutions, said that by comparison, the S&P 500 Total Return Index rose 2.85% in April. For the-year-to date through the end of April hedge funds returned 6.86% while the S&P was up 19.32%. “Several factors buoyed investor sentiment in April, including U.S. first quarter growth exceeding expectations and strong U.S. consumer spending and March jobs reports,” said Sol Waksman, president of BarclayHedge. “Hopeful signs in the U.S.-China trade dispute as President Trump directed negotiators to reach a solution bolstered equity markets, while reports that Chinese economic growth held steady in the first quarter gave a further boost to investor confidence,” Sol added.
AP1’s Insourcing of HF Strategies Nears Completion (Hedge Nordic)
Stockholm (HedgeNordic) – Sweden’s AP1 fund, which previously embarked on a process of overhauling its allocation approach to alternative investments, has turned to more diversified and less liquid hedge funds. As previously reported by HedgeNordic, AP1 decided to insource some hedge fund strategies, predominantly trend-following strategies. The AP1 fund has allocated around five percent of its entire portfolio to hedge funds over the years, having allocated around SEK 15 billion or 4.6 percent of its assets to hedge funds at the end of last year. “We used hedge funds with a focus on CTAs. Today, we do similar strategies internally,” AP1’s Chief Executive Officer Johan Magnusson (pictured) was quoted in an AMWatch article.
A Senior Hedge Fund Manager Admits to Lying to Prosecutors in New York (Bloomberg)
Michael L. Cohen, the former European head of Och-Ziff Capital Management Group, pleaded guilty to a single count of lying to U.S. authorities a year after they accused him of cheating a client out of millions of dollars. In a sign the U.S. case against Cohen has largely unraveled, prosecutors agreed to dismiss the remaining nine counts, including several fraud charges.
