Hedge Fund’s Route to 30% Fees: Cash Advances to Hip-Hop Artists (Bloomberg)
Stephen Marley comes from music royalty. Sean Garrett has written and produced smash hits for Beyoncé, Usher and Ciara. Even so, when they and hundreds of lesser-known names in the world of hip-hop and rap needed cash, one Wall Street figure emerged as an unlikely source behind the financing: hedge-fund titan Jamie Dinan. In a few short years, Sound Royalties, a West Palm Beach firm started within a unit of Dinan’s York Capital Management, has become ubiquitous in the music industry.
Billionaire Ken Griffin’s $238 million (CNBC)
It was the sale that shocked the world — and the housing data. Hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin’s $238 million purchase of a condo in Manhattan single-handedly boosted the average sales price in the borough by more than $100,000 in the first quarter, according to an analysis. A report from Douglas Elliman and Miller Samuel showed that the average sales price for an apartment in Manhattan rose nearly 10 percent to $2,118,780 in the first quarter from a year earlier. That number surprised many since the Manhattan real estate market has been on a downward slide for over a year and a half.
PG&E Is Near a Deal With Hedge Funds on CEO, Board Overhaul (Bloomberg)
PG&E Corp., the bankrupt California power giant facing $30 billion in wildfire liabilities, is nearing a deal with a group of investors that includes naming Bill Johnson as chief executive officer and overhauling its board, according to people familiar with the matter. PG&E is nearing an agreement with the group — consisting of Knighthead Capital Management, Redwood Capital Management and Abrams Capital Management — to hire Johnson, the outgoing CEO of the federally operated power agency Tennessee Valley Authority, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the matter is private.
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Hedge Funds’ Q1 Return of +2.5% Extends Run of Positive Performance (Opalesque.com)
In a context were both equity and bond markets rallied in Q1, hedge funds delivered returns close to +2.5%, Lyxor said in its Weekly Brief. According to the Lyxor Global UCITS peer group, high beta strategies such as Special Situations, EM-Global Macro and directional L/S Equity outperformed (+3.5 to +4%). Meanwhile, relative to others, low beta strategies such as L/S Equity Market Neutral and Merger Arbitrage underperformed (+0.5% to +1%). L/S Credit and CTAs delivered returns in a range of +2% to +2.7%. CTAs delivered strong returns both last week and in March (+2.9%), which compensated for the losses in January when their short equity positioning detracted from performance.
Everything Sucks For Hedge Funds But Everyone Wants To Be In Them (DealBreaker)
Things have been bad for hedge funds for a while, and by some measures they continue to be: Just 561 hedge funds were launched last year, the smallest number since that most auspicious of years, 2000, and 98 fewer than died over the same period. There’s that whole inverted yield curve thing, and the fact that 10 times as many hedge fund investors are paying 1.5% than are paying 2%. Oh, yea, and in spite of all the attrition, clients still think there’s too much money chasing too few opportunities.
This is How Eager People are to Join ExodusPoint (eFinancialCareers.com)
Flush with a record $8.5 billion in seed money, Michael Gelband‘s hedge fund – ExodusPoint, is still hiring. And it’s becoming apparent how much people are willing to give up to go and work there. Titles don’t mean quite as much on the buy-side as they do on the sell-side. However, being a portfolio manager (PM) usually comes with more gravitas than being an analyst, even though the latter can conceivably earn more than the former, depending on the firm. It therefore says a lot about ExodusPoint’s reputation in the industry – and their ability to pay a premium – that people are willing to downshift from a PM role to join the firm.
