Steve Cohen-Backed Firm Invests $10M in Web3 Game Marketplace AQUA (Coin Desk)
AQUA, a Web3 community platform for gamers, has launched its flagship marketplace for trading in-game assets. The startup also announced a $10 million investment from DIGITAL, an investment firm backed by Steve Cohen. The hedge fund billionaire owns the New York Mets baseball team, oversees Point72 Asset Management and has invested in crypto since 2018. Web3 game assets are typically non-fungible tokens (NFT) that allow players to take items like weapons and armor into the ecosystems of other games. The AQUA marketplace provides a community-driven place for players to buy and sell those assets.
Billionaire Druckenmiller would be ‘Stunned’ If No Recession in 2023 (TeleTrader.com)
Billionaire investor and hedge fund manager Stanley Druckenmiller said on Wednesday he would be “stunned” if the United States avoided a recession in 2023. “Our central case is a hard landing by the end of ’23,” Druckenmiller stated at CNBC’s Delivering Alpha Investor Summit in New York City. “I will be stunned if we don’t have recession in ’23. I don’t know the timing but certainly by the end of ’23. I will not be surprised if it’s not larger than the so-called average garden variety… I don’t rule out something really bad,” he added. The billionaire stressed the recession would come as a result of the Federal Reserve’s aggressive rate hikes, which he branded a “big mistake.”
Chancellor’s Old Boss Crispin Odey Bets on Pound Falling Further (The Times)
The hedge fund boss who once employed the chancellor has predicted that sterling will weaken further after his firm bet on the continued fall in the value of the pound. Crispin Odey is one of at least two prominent Conservative donors who have made fortunes by betting on the pound’s decline. He believes it could reach parity against the US dollar for the first time, or even fall below it.
Phongphan/Shutterstock.com
Ray Dalio Says the U.K.’s Policies ‘Suggest Incompetence’ and Warns Other Governments Not to Make the Same Mistakes (Fortune)
Ray Dalio added his name to a growing list of critics of the U.K.’s new spending plan, unveiled last week by Prime Minister Liz Truss and Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng. The billionaire investor—who founded what is now the world’s largest hedge fund, Bridgewater Associates, in 1975—argued the plan’s aggressive tax cuts will raise the U.K. debts to an unsustainable level and cripple the pound. “Investors and policymakers: Heed the lesson of the UK’s fiscal blunder,” Dalio wrote in a Tuesday tweet. “The panic selling you are now seeing that is leading to the plunge of UK bonds, currency, and financial assets is due to the recognition that the big supply of debt that will have to be sold by the government is much too much for the demand.”
Sound Point Capital Management Appoints Senior Director of Business Development for Independent Wealth Team (Hedge Week)
Sound Point Capital Management (Sound Point), a credit-focused investment manager with more than $32 billion in assets, has hired Merrill Martin as its new Senior Director of Business Development for their Independent Wealth team. Martin, who will be focused on covering Key Accounts, Family Offices, and Registered Investment Advisors, joins Sound Point from Credit Suisse Asset Management, where he worked for over a decade in roles including Strategy, Chief Operating Officer of Retail Distribution, and most recently as a Senior Relationship Manager. At Credit Suisse, he managed and covered Key Accounts, Registered Investment Advisors, Family Offices, Foundations and Endowments, and Pension Funds.
