Hedge Fund and Insider Trading News: Politan Capital Management, Millennium Partners, Horatius Fund, Sussex Partners, Thor Industries, Inc. (THO), Natus Medical Inc (NTUS), and More

A Top Millennium Quant Exec is Jumping Ship for a Stealthy and Fast-Growing Proprietary Trading Firm in Chicago (Business Insider)
A senior quant executive at hedge fund giant Millennium Partners is leaving to join a quiet but quickly growing proprietary trading firm in the Midwest. Alejandro Cañete, the global head of the systematic strategies platform at Millennium, is taking a senior role at Chicago Trading Company (CTC), according to people familiar with the matter. CTC is a quantitative proprietary trading firm that specializes in derivatives. Representatives for Millennium and CTC declined to comment. Cañete declined to comment.

Geopolitical Hedge Fund Shuts Down Due to Pandemic (Opalesque)
Dominic Armstrong, co-founder and CEO of the Horatius Fund, a geopolitical hedge fund, announced that at the end of December, the firm would be returning funds to investors and cease trading. “Ultimately the global pandemic has made it very difficult to meet new potential investors face to face, and that ‘airlock’ in the supply chain of potential new assets to manage – vital for a small emerging fund – has alas proved unbridgeable,” he says in an emailed announcement seen by Opalesque.

Centene Settles with Activist Politan, Overhauls Board, CEO to Exit (Reuters)
BOSTON, Dec 14 (Reuters) – Centene Corp (CNC.N) reached a deal with activist investment firm Politan Capital Management in which five new directors will join the managed care company’s board and its chief executive will retire in 2022 after serving for a quarter of a century.

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Why Hedge Funds Trading on Fundamentals Have Had a Tough Time (CNBC)
Patrick Ghali, managing partner at advisory firm Sussex Partners, discusses hedge fund performance across 2021, the outlook for next year and the impact of increased market volatility on returns.

Fresh VIX Spikes Offer Persistent Opportunities for Hedge Funds (Hedge Week)
Increasingly frequent spikes in the VIX volatility index could offer hedge funds and other investment managers strong return opportunities amid the resulting equity market gyrations, new analysis published by Man Group suggests. Probing various trends emerging from the biggest VIX surges over the past 30 years, Man’s ‘Views From The Floor’ commentary noted that four of the top 10 spikes have occurred since the Covid-19 pandemic. At the end of last month, the volatility index soared by some 11 points – a 10-month high – as a result of growing fears over the emerging Omicron Covid-19 variant.