What Steve Cohen Should Have Tweeted About the Mets (Bloomberg Quint)
(Bloomberg Opinion) — I have no idea why New York Mets owner and billionaire hedge fund manager Steve Cohen tweeted that “it’s hard to understand how professional hitters can be this unproductive. The best teams have a more disciplined approach. The slugging and OPS numbers don’t lie.” If I were trading for Cohen and had five big losing trades in a row (the Mets had just lost five games in a row at the time of the tweet) bringing me to a net loss for the year (the losses pushed the Mets to one game below .500), I would know what it means if he walked to my desk and said, “Aaron, it’s hard to understand how a professional trader could be so unproductive. The best traders have a more disciplined approach. Your P&L numbers don’t lie.”
Investment Readjustment At Bridgewater Associates: Is The World’s Largest Hedge Fund Preparing For A Markets Slump? (Market Research Telecast)
The world’s largest hedge fund, Bridgewater Associates, has made several changes to its investment portfolio in the second quarter of this year that send signals that the entity founded by Ray Dalio is bracing for a stock market crash. The fund’s main acquisitions, which manages some $ 150 billion. According to Forbes, they focused on the financial, consumables, healthcare and consumer discretionary sectors, according to data from WhaleWisdom. The largest transaction was the purchase of 2,565,000 shares of Coca Cola followed by a bundle of listed mutual funds iShares MSCI Emerging Index Fund (1.7 million), 1.6 million shares of Walmart, 1.5 million Procter & Gamble and 1.1 million Johnson & Johnson.
Hedge Funds from Massive Money Managers BlackRock and Pimco are Trailing the Average So Far This Year (Business Insider)
Hedge funds from two asset managers, BlackRock and Pimco, are trailing the average fund this year. One fund in BlackRock’s lineup beat the 10% return that the average hedge fund delivered through July. Pimco’s $5.8 billion Tactical Opportunities Fund saw a 9.4% increase year to date at the end of July. Some of BlackRock’s hedge funds have seen stronger performance so far in 2021 than earlier this year, but four of its five strategies are still underperforming the average fund.
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Global Fund Management Launches New Mixed Asset Arbitrage Fund (Hedge Week)
Global Fund Management, the asset management arm of the GDA Group, has launched its latest venture, the Avalon Fund. The fund is being launched by 12 Peers Capital, in partnership with GDA Capital, to provide a mixed asset arbitrage vehicle offering short and long exposure into digital assets, equities, and fixed income products. “Our mission is to create long-term value for our investors through the identification of digital asset strategies that generate alpha, while also limiting potential downside by generating yields from traditional market exposure like equities and bonds,” says GDA Group COO Zachary Friedman.
Cathie Wood Says Stocks are Not in a Bubble, Thinks Investors Betting Against Her Fund are Off Base (CNBC)
ARK Invest’s Cathie Wood on Thursday defended her innovation-focused strategies in the wake of investors betting against her funds. “I don’t think we’re in a bubble which is what I think many bears think we are,” Wood said on CNBC’s “Tech Check” on Thursday. “In a bubble, and I remember the late ’90s, our strategies would have been cheered on. You remember the leap frogging of analysts making estimates one higher than the other, price targets one higher than the other. We have nothing like that right now. In fact, you see a lot of IPOs or [special purpose acquisition companies] coming out and falling to earth. We couldn’t be further away from a bubble.”
Recognition for the Smaller and Younger (Hedge Nordic)
Stockholm (HedgeNordic) – The nominations for this year’s HFM EU Emerging Manager Awards have been released, with the recently-announced shortlist featuring 15 Nordic hedge funds. The award ceremony for the HFM EU Emerging Manager Awards, which honors the best-performing smaller and recently launched hedge funds in Europe, will take place at One Great George Street in London on November 16. The nominations are based on a combination of annualized returns and Sharpe ratios over the 12-month period through mid-2021.
BlackRock Joins $200 Million in Funding for Startup Breeze Air (Bloomberg)
(Bloomberg) — BlackRock Inc. and Knighthead Capital Management are investing in a $200 million second round of capital to support the expansion of startup low-cost carrier Breeze Airways. The funding also includes additional investments by Peterson Partners Inc. and Sandlot Partners, which helped provide an initial $100 million in capital that backed the May start of flights by the Salt Lake City-based carrier, Breeze Aviation Group Inc. said Wednesday.
Volatility Vet is the Latest to Launch a Crypto Hedge Fund Firm (BollyInside)
The first, Iceberg Bitcoin Income Fund, aims to utilize options on Bitcoin — and also Ethereum — to crank out risk-adjusted returns that are not designed to “capture the extreme upside,” Weinig told Crypto Investor. Jake Weinig started trading two crypto hedge fund vehicles via his Iceberg Capital Group with an undisclosed sum of day-one capital on July 1. “Crypto in general has a tremendous amount of price inefficiencies, Weinig said. “The derivatives world was just that on steroids.”
Thursday 8/19 Insider Buying Report: APP, DIBS (Nasdaq.com)
At Applovin Corp (APP), a filing with the SEC revealed that on Tuesday, CFO Herald Y. Chen purchased 25,000 shares of APP, for a cost of $60.00 each, for a total investment of $1.5M. So far Chen is in the green, up about 10.8% on their buy based on today’s trading high of $66.48. Applovin Corp is trading up about 3.9% on the day Thursday. Before this latest buy, Chen made one other buy in the past year, purchasing $1.53M shares at a cost of $61.01 a piece. And at 1stdibs.com (DIBS), there was insider buying on Wednesday, by Chief Executive Officer David S. Rosenblatt who purchased 100,000 shares for a cost of $14.94 each, for a total investment of $1.49M. 1stdibs.com Inc is trading down about 1.4% on the day Thursday.
What Did This CEO Just Do with Personal Shares of Hilltop Holdings (NYSE: HTH)? (Analyst Ratings)
Yesterday, the PlainsCapital Bank Pres & CEO of Hilltop Holdings (HTH), Jerry Schaffner, sold shares of HTH for $990.9K. Following Jerry Schaffner’s last HTH Sell transaction on August 12, 2014, the stock climbed by 14.3%. The company has a one-year high of $39.60 and a one-year low of $17.80. HTH’s market cap is $2.67 billion and the company has a P/E ratio of 5.80. Currently, Hilltop Holdings has an average volume of 146.30K.
