Million-dollar listings: Couple sells Palm Beach condo for $6.5M; last year, their $105M-house buy set a Florida record (PalmBeachDailyNews.com)
The couple who late last year set a Florida residential price record — via a Palm Beach deal recorded at $105 million — have parted with their penthouse condominium across town for $6.5 million, courthouse records show. In the sale recorded Friday, hedge-fund manager Steven Schonfeld sold the four-bedroom oceanfront condo at 3000 S. Ocean Blvd., which he shared with his wife, Brooke Kaplan Schonfeld.
French Billionaires Raise Stakes in Defence of Publisher Lagardere (Reuters)
PARIS (Reuters) – France’s business elite closed ranks around publishing group Lagardere (LAGA.PA) on Monday with LVMH’s Bernard Arnault and Vivendi’s (VIV.PA) Vincent Bollore swooping in to bolster its defences against London-based hedge fund Amber Capital. Arnault, France’s richest man, has bought a 25% stake in Lagardere Capital & Management (LCM), the personal holding company of Arnaud Lagardere, the heir of founder Jean-Luc Lagardere. The move shores up its finances after LCM’s debts exceeded the value of its 7.3% stake in the Lagardere Group.
Accendo Embarks on a New Journey (Hedge Nordic)
Stockholm (HedgeNordic) – Activist investor Accendo Capital has acquired a 16.5 percent-stake in Finnish cybersecurity company, SSH Communications Security Corporation, from the founder and largest shareholder of SSH, Tatu Ylönen. SSH is the latest addition to Accendo’s concentrated portfolio of publicly-listed Northern European companies that are driving, or benefiting from, technological innovation. “We are investing in SSH because of its unique world-class expertise,” says Henri Österlund (pictured centre), founder of Accendo Capital. “We want to help the company reach its full potential in the growing cybersecurity market, and will work in collaboration with SSH founder Mr. Ylönen and the SSH team.” As an engaged investor, Accendo usually acquires ownership stakes between five and 25 percent in small- and mid-cap publicly-listed companies to initiate a collaborative campaign of value creation.
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Opalesque Roundup: Hedge Funds’ Total Assets Dropped More than $300bn in a Single Month: Hedge Fund News, Week 21 (Opalesque.com)
In the week ending May 22nd 2020, BarclayHedge said that there were more than $85 billion in redemptions in a disastrous March, when hedge funds also suffered trading losses of $229.1 billion. In a single month, hedge funds’ total assets dropped more than $300 billion – roughly a tenth of the industry’s total assets. Investors continued to pull money out of hedge funds in April, withdrawing $18.1 billion from hedge funds around the world last month, according to the just-released April 2020 eVestment Hedge Fund Asset Flows Report. However, following substantial losses in March, hedge funds made strong gains in April as global equity markets rebounded. The Preqin All-Strategies Hedge Fund benchmark returned +6.42%, compared with -9.20% the previous month. This bumped the 2020 YTD figure up to -4.99% and the 12-month return to -1.21%.
Over 100 people Claim Jeffrey Epstein is Their Father in Bid for $635M Fortune (Fox Business)
More than 100 people have said they believe Jeffrey Epstein was their father with the hopes of receiving a portion of the now-deceased financier’s $635 million estate, according to a recent report. Approximately 30 percent of the 386 people who have contacted Epsteinheirs.com have said they might be heirs to his fortune, The Sun UK reported late Sunday. The website was created by Morse Genealogical Services, which, according to the website, seeks to locate “missing and unknown heirs to estates worldwide.”
Impact Investing: Green Finance and Achieving Measurable Impact (Hedge Week)
By Jim Neumann, CIO, Sussex Partners – The news that Blackrock is to advise the European Commission on how the EU could boost the growth of green finance and build the market for sustainable financial products is a welcome announcement. It is also a long overdue step forward. For many years, institutional asset managers and allocators have been calling for the development of consistent ESG standards that can be universally adopted and applied to investment decision making. These alternatives allocators, to both hedge fund and private equity style vehicles, now seem to have assets ready to deploy as standardisation occurs. Five years ago, in September 2015, when the United Nations published its 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, it established 17 Sustainable Development Goals (or SDGs), each one covering a different area from hunger eradication to clean energy and climate action.
