A Famous Hedge Fund Chief Who Managed to Net Record Returns as Stocks Fell in 2022 Says Investors Should Look Abroad to Profit (Fortune)
U.S. stocks have consistently outperformed their international peers over the past three decades, but AQR Capital Management cofounder and chief investment officer Cliff Asness believes the streak may be coming to an end. “Looking back, U.S. outperformance since 1990 can largely be explained by relative richening against other equity markets,” the billionaire investor wrote in an article for The Journal of Portfolio Management released April 28, describing how American stocks have become increasingly expensive compared with international counterparts. “Investors betting on continued U.S. outperformance may be making a perilous assumption that this richening will continue, despite historically high relative valuations suggesting the opposite is more likely.”
Dan Loeb’s Activism Is Not Pulling His Hedge Fund Out of the Red (Institutional Investor)
Third Point posted a slight uptick in April, but not enough to turn things around. At the end of 2022, Third Point’s Dan Loeb predicted that the time was ripe for activism. He said stocks were cheap and corporate executives had taken their eye off the ball because of what he called the “delusion” around ESG and “stakeholder capitalism.”
Bacon Awarded $203m in Defamation Case (Hedge Week)
Louis Bacon, the founder and chief executive of New York-based global macro hedge fund Moore Capital Management, ‘made’ $203 million this week, but the cash came from the resolution of a long-running court battle rather than any trading prowess, according to a report by the Financial Times. A New York judge awarded Bacon the money in damages at the end of a bitter and long-running defamation case against his former Bahamas neighbour, Canadian fashion mogul Peter Nygard.
Higher Performance Fee for Opportunity (Hedge Nordic)
Stockholm (HedgeNordic) – Swedish asset manager Atlant Fonder is raising the performance fee – the cut from above-benchmark returns – for its largest fund, Atlant Opportunity. The performance-based fee, which is paid on returns exceeding the 90-day Swedish treasury bills, will be raised from 10 percent to 15 percent on June 1. Atlant Opportunity, the largest fund under the umbrella of multi-fund boutique Atlant Fonder with SEK 5.4 billion under management, was launched in January 2016 with no performance fee.
Pushpay Gone, and for Some Offshore Hedge Funds, for Less Than Hoped (AFR.com)
Here’s an under-the-radar development hedge funds won’t want to miss. The takeover of dual-listed church payments company Pushpay sailed through a shareholder vote last week, handing control to the Sixth Street and BGH Capital consortium. But the fine print of the deal shows that while most shareholders are set to receive $NZ1.42 ($1.33) per share, a smaller group of “specified shareholders” – profiled as 10 professional offshore event-driven hedge fund investors controlling 10.3 per cent of the stock – agreed to accept $NZ1.34 per share.