Hedge Fund Snaps Up LPL Financial Shares (InvestmentNews.com)
It looks as if private equity investors aren’t the only ones interested in buying into the financial advice industry. On Monday, hedge fund Lone Pine Capital said in a filing that it had recently acquired almost 2.3 million shares of LPL Financial Holdings Inc., the parent company of the eponymous broker-dealer, or almost 2.9% of LPL’s shares (LPLA) outstanding. Private equity investors have flooded into the wealth management and registered investment adviser industry in the past six years, driving up the valuations of large RIAs. But it’s not unprecedented for a hedge fund to buy shares and take a position in an publicly traded firm like LPL Financial Holdings. In 2015, activist hedge fund investor Marcato Capital Management took a 6.3% stake in LPL Financial Holdings, claiming at the time that LPL’s share price was undervalued.
Bill Ackman Among Investors as Venture Capital Crypto Firm Shima Capital Raises $200M Fund (Coin Desk)
Shima Capital has raised $200 million for its first venture capital fund to support early-stage Web3 startups. The fund debuted on the same day as a $300 million purse from CoinFund, dual signs that investors remain confident during the crypto bear market. “There’s been crypto funds that have grown and ballooned in size to billions of dollars of assets under management,” founder and managing partner Yida Gao told CoinDesk in an interview. “It’s hard for them to invest in the earliest stages of Web3 founders … We think that’s an area that we can add the most value.”
Month in Review – July 2022 (Hedge Nordic)
Stockholm (HedgeNordic) – After suffering their worst half-year performance since the second half of 2008, Nordic hedge funds advanced 2.0 percent on average in July (97 percent reported) to trim their to-date decline to 5.2 percent. Trend-following CTAs, the top-performing strategy group in the first half of 2022, gave up some of their gains in July.
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Venn by Two Sigma Partners with Coinbase (Hedge Week)
Venn, Two Sigma’s portfolio analytics platform, is partnering with Coinbase Institutional to help educate institutional investors on the digital asset space. The initiative aims to empower institutional investors with the insights needed to incorporate risk analysis of digital assets into their capital allocation frameworks. This collaboration comes amid both volatility and a record amount of institutional capital invested in the asset class, highlighting the need for multi-asset portfolio and risk analytics. Institutional inflows into cryptocurrencies have risen from $6.8 billion in 2020 to $9.3 billion in 2022, marking a 36% jump in the 2-year period, per data from CoinShares. Additionally, 37 crypto-linked investment products were launched in 2021, up from 24 in 2020 – driving the total number of institutional crypto products to 132 globally.
Elliott Looms Over $16 Billion Philip Morris Deal (The Wall Street Journal)
Hedge funds have a message for one of the biggest names in Big Tobacco: Cough up. Philip Morris International Inc (PM) might have to raise its $16 billion friendly bid for Swedish Match AB (SWMA) to gain full ownership of the smokeless-tobacco maker, in what could prove to be the latest instance of a hedge-fund trade often linked to Elliott Management Corp.
Unilever Exec: Investor Peltz Supportive of Sustainability Drive (Reuters)
LONDON, Aug 17 (Reuters) – Activist investor Nelson Peltz is “supportive” of a plan by consumer goods maker Unilever (ULVR.L) to de-carbonize all five of its newly established business units, in an endorsement of its sustainability strategy, a Unilever executive told Reuters. The maker of Knorr stock cubes and Magnum ice creams earlier this year fielded criticism from some shareholders about the importance it places on having social purpose behind brands. It has set a target of net zero emissions by 2039.
