Bill Ackman Says ‘Go Long’: 2021 will be ‘Very, Very Good Year’ (Australian Financial Review)
Bill Ackman predicts 2021 will be a rewarding year for the equity market and urged investors to “go long”, but the Wall Street legend and Pershing Square founder worries that irrespective of Pfizer’s vaccine breakthrough, the US faces a grim winter of coronavirus casualties. In a week where Australian shares advanced 3.5 per cent and the Dow Jones Industrial Average was on track for a 2.7 per cent return, investors are turning their thoughts to the promise of stability under US President-elect Joe Biden, a gridlocked Washington incapable of policy gambles, and the possibility of inoculating most of the world against COVID-19 by mid- to late-2021.
Bitcoin Has Helped Billionaire Paul Tudor Jones Put Up Above-Average Returns So Far This Year. Here’s How He Compares with Other Big-Name Macro Investors. (Business Insider)
Paul Tudor Jones, the billionaire founder of Tudor Investment Corporation, is up more than 9% through October in his $3.7 billion BVI Global fund. Other macro managers, like Andrew Law’s Caxton Associates and Brevan Howard‘s smaller fund run by Alfredo Saitta, have put up double-digit returns so far this year. Bitcoin’s rise has contributed to Tudor’s success this year, as he holds a significant amount of the cryptocurrency in his fund.
Awkward, Irritable Hedge Fund Manager Turns Out To Be Expansive, Open-Hearted Baseball Team Owner (Deal Breaker)
Like a lot of hedge fund managers, Steve Cohen tends to shun the spotlight. He’s reticent about giving interviews – understandable if you’ve seen his appearance on “Cristina” back in 1992 – and, when he is buttonholed by a reporter (or opposing counsel), his public statements come off as weird, awkward, aloof, orotund. But there are few more high-profile roles than owning a Major League Baseball team in the biggest city in the country; no way to avoid putting yourself out there or to issue your on-field pronouncements exclusively in letters to Point72 clients. So we were eager – given how he spent his first day in the job – to see how Cohen would very publicly and on camera introduce himself to the Flushing faithful, and it gives us no joy as Yankees fans to say that the Big Guy hit it out of the park.
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Hedge Fund Performance Declines in October for the Second Month in a Row (Opalesque.com)
Hedge funds continued to face a difficult market environment in October as for a second consecutive month the majority of funds saw performance declines, said a report by eVestment. According to the report, the average return in the hedge fund industry came in at -0.21% in October. The tough first quarter of the year leading up to the global pandemic and the past two months have left the industry at a just-barely-positive +0.74% return year to date (YTD). This is a stark contrast to the +10.05% return the industry put up for all of 2019. Less than half (47%) of hedge funds produced positive results in October, and there weren’t any exceptional groups of performance winners or losers among the fund categories eVestment tracks.
Breakingviews – Corona Capital: DraftKings, Palantir Technologies (Reuters)
NEW YORK/HONG KONG/LONDON (Reuters Breakingviews) – Corona Capital is a daily column updated throughout the day by Breakingviews columnists around the world with short, sharp pandemic-related insights. NARROWING THE SPREAD. Everybody gets a little lucky sometimes. And DraftKings, the online sports betting outfit that went public through a special purpose acquisition company in April, is on a hot streak. Covid-19 lockdowns that have kept people out of casinos are sending them to virtual bookmakers in droves.
Hedge Fund Launch-Closure Ratio “Heavily Skewed the Wrong Way”, Says Sandbar CEO James Orme-Smith (Hedge Week)
The number of hedge fund launches compared with closures is “heavily skewed the wrong way”, says James Orme-Smith, CEO of Sandbar Asset Management, but he indicated that emerging managers can still overcome the sizeable barriers to entry. “For anyone to start their own hedge fund, capital has become the oxygen more than anything else, and has become even more important than it ever was,” Orme-Smith said during the concluding panel of this year’s Hedgeweek LIVE Europe summit.
