Activist Investor Sells Almost All Stake in Insurer Aviva (Standard.co.uk)
Hedge fund Cevian Capital had put Aviva and chief executive Amanda Blanc under intense pressure to boost returns to investors. Activist investor Cevian Capital has sold almost its entire stake in Aviva three years after first snapping up shares in the insurance giant. The hedge fund sold its stake in Aviva down to 60,000 shares on Wednesday, having built up a holding of 6.5%, or 150 million shares, at its peak last October.
It’s Millionaire vs. Billionaire in the Battle of the SoHo Pergola (The New York Times)
The rooftop of a historic building is the focus of a renovation skirmish between Federico Pignatelli, a financier, and Ray Dalio, the hedge-fund mogul. Millions of Americans embarked on home-improvement projects during the pandemic. Many of those projects annoyed their neighbors. But in SoHo, on the top floor of a co-op building filled with multimillion-dollar lofts, an apartment addition is the centerpiece of an only-in-New-York dispute, pitting a wealthy financier named Federico Pignatelli della Leonessa against Ray Dalio, the billionaire founder of Bridgewater Associates, the largest hedge fund in the world.
Millennium Taps Another Goldman Sachs Trader (Hedge Week)
Goldman Sachs has lost another trader to a hedge fund firm, with Rick Vaatsra leaving the bank’s London office this month, to join multi-strategy major Millennium Management as a senior portfolio manager based in London. Vaatsra spent over 10 years at Goldman Sachs, most recently as co-head of European index trading, having originally joined the bank as an equity derivatives trader back in November 2012. Prior to Goldman Sachs, Vaatsra, who studied finance and economics at Erasmus University Rotterdam, according to his LinkedIn profile, spent over six years at Credit Suisse as a vice president.
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Truepenny Appoints CEO Amid Launch Preparation (Hedge Nordic)
Stockholm (HedgeNordic) – Truepenny Capital Management founded by CIO Thomas Orbert, a former portfolio manager at Swedish hedge fund Nektar Management, has appointed Thomas Lönnerstam as Chief Executive Officer. The new appointment will support Truepenny Capital in the upcoming launch of Truepenny Global Macro, which is set to combine a set of strategies such as a fully systematic asset allocation strategy and a macro relative value strategy.
Hedge Fund Mogul Drops $47 Million on Ocean-View Palisades Compound (Dirt.com)
He already owns multiple lavish homes in some of California’s most affluent neighborhoods — Malibu, Montecito and Woodside, for starters — but Thomas Laffont has just finalized his biggest splurge to date: a two-house, four-parcel compound in the posh Pacific Palisades area of Los Angeles. The big buy set the Coatue Management hedge fund tycoon and his longtime wife Liz back nearly $50 million. The purchase was consummated in two separate transactions. Back in November, as first reported by The Real Deal, Laffont paid $29.5 million for two of the property’s four parcels, one with a 7,200-square-foot house and the other with a full-size tennis court.
