Klarman’s Baupost Poised to Cash In On PG&E Insurance Bet (The Wall Street Journal)
Seth Klarman’s hedge fund Baupost Group LLC is poised to rake in profits from the bankruptcy of PG&E Corp. under an $11 billion insurance settlement, the endgame of an investment strategy launched months in advance of the California utility’s bankruptcy. Public records reviewed by The Wall Street Journal indicate Baupost stands to make hundreds of millions of dollars from its investment in insurance claims tied to the wildfires that pushed PG&E into chapter 11.
Hedge Fund Arrowgrass to Shutter After Wave of Redemptions (Bloomberg)
Arrowgrass Capital Partners, the hedge fund started by a group of former Deutsche Bank AG traders, plans to shut after getting hit with a fresh round of investor redemptions. The 11-year-old firm, which employs more than 100 people in London and New York, will return capital and close, according to an investor letter seen by Bloomberg. Its assets had already slumped by half from the $6.4 billion it managed in 2017 before it received requests to withdraw another billion, according to people with knowledge of the situation.
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Billionaire investor Carl Icahn to leave New York for Florida (Reuters)
BOSTON (Reuters) – Billionaire investor Carl Icahn, a born New Yorker who has run his business from the city for decades, is moving his office, more than half of his staff and himself to Florida early next year, people familiar with the plan said on Thursday. The 83-year-old investor, known for picking winners and facing off with captains of industry, has grown weary of working in New York and has been mulling the move for several years, the people said.
This Hedge Fund Superstar Has a Singer-Songwriter Side Gig (Bloomberg)
(Bloomberg Businessweek) — Joe’s Pub in New York’s East Village might not register as a usual hangout for the Wall Street crowd, but on one night in May, you’d have thought it advertised “Quants drink free” on the CNBC crawler an hour before the close. They came to hear singer-songwriter Pete Muller, who was playing at Joe’s to support Dissolve, his fourth studio album. Muller also happens to be a founding father of the modern quantitative hedge fund. The audience isn’t always this warmed up. Muller, who sings and plays piano, had just returned from a cross-country tour opening for singer-songwriter Stephen Kellogg in places including Charleston, W.Va., and Spokane, Wash. “My wife said, ‘If you want real feedback, you’ve got to get out and play for strangers,’ ” Muller says.
ValueAct Unveils Newest Target (Institutional Investor)
The activist hedge fund is making a big bet on LKQ, once a big position of Tiger Seed Hound Partners. Jeff Ubben’s ValueAct Capital has disclosed a new activist target.The San Francisco hedge fund firm disclosed on Thursday that it owns more than 16 million shares of LKQ Corporation, or 5.2 percent of the provider of alternative and specialty auto parts, according to a fresh 13D filing.
150 Active Crypto Hedge Funds Manage $1bn AuM (Opalesque.com)
Researchers at auditing powerhouse PwC estimates there to be around 150 crypto hedge funds, controlling about $1bn in assets. This excludes crypto index funds and crypto venture capital funds. Surveying the hundred largest funds by Assets Under Management (AuM), PwC determined that they had a mean of $21.9m under management. The PwC report on the 2018 performance of crypto hedge funds said that over 60% of these funds have less than $10m in AuM with fewer than 10% managing over $50m. The median AuM of funds as of Q1 2019 ($4.3m) is 3X that of the median AuM at fund launch ($1.2m – January 2018), which indicates that funds have been relatively successful at fundraising despite difficult market conditions.
Hedge Funds Down 0.78 per cent in August, Says Backstop BarclayHedge (HedgeWeek.com)
The hedge fund industry posted negative returns in August, dropping 0.78 per cent, according to the Barclay Hedge Fund Index, compiled by BarclayHedge, a division of Backstop Solutions. By comparison, the S&P Total Return Index was down 1.58 per cent in August. Despite the down month, hedge funds remained in positive territory for the year, gaining 6.86 per cent through 31 August. The S&P Total Return Index returned 18.35 per cent on the year through August. August’s hedge fund difficulties were fuelled by the usual suspects: the US-China trade war, ongoing no-deal Brexit uncertainty, and recession fears.
