A Capitalist Repents: Jeff Ubben Is Out to Make Things Right (Bloomberg)
Jeff Ubben wants you to know he’s sorry. As the founder of $16 billion activist hedge fund ValueAct Capital, Ubben embodied the boisterous capitalism that elevated shareholder returns above all else in the years after the financial crisis. He stepped down in June after two decades and launched Inclusive Capital Partners, which backs companies tackling problems ranging from environmental damage to food scarcity and affordable education.
We Spoke to 40 Insiders About How Silver Lake’s Egon Durban Amassed Power at the Media-Shy Private Equity Firm (Business Insider)
Egon Durban, the co-CEO of private equity firm Silver Lake Partners, is a newly-minted billionaire who has been drawing comparisons to Warren Buffett, with membership in some of golf’s most exclusive clubs and an inside track to the Oscars. A Texas native who made his name acquiring and then selling Skype, he has rapidly become the lead dealmaker on investments spanning entertainment, media, and technology.
Japanese Economy Ministry Making Totally Innocent, Non-Threatening Phone Calls To Foreign Toshiba Shareholders (Deal Breaker)
For years, activist investors of the foreign variety were about as welcome in Japan as Commodore Perry’s gunboats a century and a half earlier. Indeed, any attempt from outside to change Japan’s rather sclerotic corporate culture was treated as a national security threat, as Chris Hohn will unhappily tell you. Then, at last, an opening: Among the many reforms promised by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was that of corporate governance, the sort of thing that people like Paul Singer view as an open invitation. After all, in the wake of the whole ongoing SoftBank catastrophe, it was pretty much the least he could do.
Rawpixel / shutterstock.com
Tom Steyer Asks $11 Million for Longtime San Francisco Home (The Wall Street Journal)
Billionaire environmental activist and former presidential candidate Tom Steyer is selling a couple of homes in his portfolio. Last month, he parted with a Lake Tahoe home for $2.8 million, and now he is putting his longtime family home in San Francisco’s exclusive Pacific Heights neighborhood on the market for $11 million. “Our family has a ton of great memories in that house,” Mr. Steyer said in an email of the San Francisco home. “We kept it in the hopes that one of our kids would move in there someday, but that doesn’t…
Quant Macro Specialist ThirdYear and Agathon Capital Unveil Systematic Global Macro Strategy (Hedge Week)
ThirdYear Capital, a Munich-based quantitative macro specialist, has paired up with Cologne-based fund initiator Agathon Capital to unveil a new systematic global macro hedge fund strategy which targets opportunities stemming from short-term economic data trends. The ART Global Macro Fund uses near-term economic forecasts to identify trading opportunities in fundamental financial trends as well as turning points in capital markets. The fund, which launched last month with EUR20 million (USD23.6 million) in seed capital, trades a range of liquid and exchange-traded instruments including equities, government bond, inflation and currency futures, and can use derivatives to build short positions.
Snowflake had the Biggest-Ever Software IPO. Execs at Coatue, Fidelity, and FactSet Explain Why They Were Early Adopters of the Company’s Data Exchange and How It Can Transform Wall Street (Business Insider)
As Wall Street’s obsession with data continues to grow, firms are eager to make digesting information as easy as possible. Snowflake, which posted the biggest-ever software IPO on Wednesday, has launched a data exchange that already counts hedge funds like Philippe Laffont‘s Coatue and data vendors like FactSet as users. “I think it’s going to be the way people want to access data in the future,” the chief technology and product officer at FactSet told Business Insider.
