One Hedge Fund Is Up 223% This Year Thanks to a Big Bet Against Tech Stocks (The Wall Street Journal)
Coltrane Asset Management reaped profits on a two-year short of tech and growth companies. In late 2020, Mandeep Manku made a big contrarian bet. His hedge fund, Coltrane Asset Management, had already been hit hard when markets plunged because of Covid-19. He decided to swing Coltrane’s portfolio from favoring cheap European companies to betting against tech and other fast-growing companies in the U.S. Markets with so many stocks trading at more than 10 times their revenues, with fervor concentrated in a few sectors, “always end poorly for investors,” Coltrane told clients in a September 2020 presentation.
Activist Fund Bluebell Targets Board Changes at Richemont (Reuters)
ZURICH, July 19 (Reuters) – Activist fund manager Bluebell Capital Partners is seeking changes to the board at Richemont (CFR.S), Richemont said on Tuesday, Bluebell’s first salvo against the Swiss luxury group that makes Cartier jewellery and IWC watches. London-based Bluebell, with around 250 million euros ($255.98 million) in assets, grabbed the spotlight last year when its campaign at French group Danone (DANO.PA) led to a management overhaul.
Novogratz Says He Was ‘Darn Wrong’ on Crypto Leverage Risks (Bloomberg)
Mike Novogratz, the billionaire investor who once called himself the “Forrest Gump of Bitcoin,” said the recent turbulence in the cryptocurrency industry is a “full-fledged credit crisis” and acknowledged that he was “darn wrong” about the magnitude of the leverage in the system. “What I don’t think people expected was the magnitude of losses that would show up in professional institutions’ balance sheets and that caused the daisy chain of events,” Novogratz said at the Bloomberg Crypto Summit Tuesday. “It turned into a full fledged credit crisis with complete liquidation and huge damage on confidence in the space.”
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Hedge Funds Warn SEC Dealer Rule is ‘Unenforceable’ (Risk.net)
US hedge funds are alarmed that they could be inadvertently hit by two proposed rules from the Securities and Exchange Commission that ostensibly seem to be targeted at non-bank market-makers. “We have had a number of enquiries from our larger clients in the leveraged relative value hedge fund community who are concerned about getting swept in with both standards,” says a fixed income trading executive at a large US investment bank.
Polen Taps Brigade Capital CEO as President of Firm (Pensions&Investments)
Karl Dasher was named president of money manager Polen Capital Management. It is a new position, a spokeswoman said in an email. Mr. Dasher, who started July 1, focuses on investment team administration and development, along with expanding the Boca Raton, Fla.-based manager’s credit platform. Mr. Dasher was previously CEO of Brigade Capital Management. Officials there could not be immediately reached for further information.
