Inside the life and stellar career of the self-made New York financier who has become so wealthy he just bought America’s most expensive home for $145M (Daily Mail)
At 24 he reportedly negotiated a $1 million salary from the man who inspired Michael Douglas’ Wall Street character Gordon Gekko. Last year he took home $250 million. And earlier this month he splashed $147 million for a vacation home, which happened to be the costliest private residence ever sold in the United States. Meet Barry Rosenstein, the 54-year-old New York financier whose personal wealth is estimated at $1.3 billion, according to Forbes.
Exclusive hedge funds crack open door to Main Street (Reuters)
As a $14.8 billion hedge fund with a reputation for savvy mortgage trades and a record of double-digit returns, Pine River Capital Management has long signed up multi-billion-dollar pension and sovereign wealth funds as investors. Now the exclusive hedge fund is making some of its strategies available to Main Street investors who’ve been warned that bets on stocks and bonds may not see them through retirement. For as little as $1,000, they can include hedge funds in their nest eggs.
Rachesky’s game puts satellite company sale in jeopardy (New York Post)
Hedge-fund manager Mark Rachesky is playing another game of “The Price is Right,” the Loral edition. Rachesky’s MHR Fund Management, which owns a controlling stake in Loral Space & Communications Ltd. (NASDAQ:LORL), put the New York satellite company on the block in January. The former Carl Icahn protégé is said to be seeking between $80 and $90 a share for Loral — well above Friday’s closing price of $70.94. The stock is down from a high of $82.13 after The Post first broke news of the auction.
Dan Loeb’s Top Bullish Moves During the First Quarter (Insider Monkey)
Dan Loeb, the manager of Third Point is one of the pioneers in activist investing. Third Point had over $15 billion in Assets Under Management at the end of the first quarter of the year and revealed an equity portfolio worth $6.81 billion in the latest round of 13F filings. During the first three months of the year, Dan Loeb’s fund added over 20 new positions to its equity portfolio and raised its stakes in eight of its holdings.
Woodbine Capital Hedge Fund Said to Return Client Money (Bloomberg)
Joshua Berkowitz, who started hedge-fund firm Woodbine Capital Advisors LP on the heels of producing a 121 percent gain as a trader for billionaire George Soros in 2008, is returning client money after failing to meet performance goals, a person briefed on the matter said. The manager told clients in a letter yesterday that he will give back their capital at the end of the month, said the person, who asked not to be identified because the information is private. Todd Fogarty, a spokesman for New York-based Woodbine at Kekst & Co., declined to comment on the plans.
SumZero’s stock picking contest (CNBC.com)
Savvy Hedge Fund Manager Buys Hard-Hit Small-Caps (Barron’s)
Mario Cibelli has been picking stocks since his seventh-grade social studies teacher in Middletown, N.Y., told the class how the stock market worked. He had his father drive him to a local stockbroker’s office, where he bought 10 Norstar Bancorp shares for $268.75. A few years later when he was in college, Cibelli sold his bank shares for $836.09 to buy his first car, a used VW Beetle. Cibelli had a good idea of what he wanted to do with his life.
Hedge fund Toscafund buys 10% stake in Hoist Finance worth $37.1m (Opalesque)
London-based hedge fund manager Toscafund Asset Management bought a 10% stake in Stockholm-based debt purchaser and collector firm Hoist Finance, worth $37.1m (GBP 30m). A report from the FT said that by buying into the Swedish company focused on recovering distressed consumer loans, Toscafund fund will have the opportunity to exploit regulatory pressure on European banks to offload their bad debts. The report added the hedge fund group is planning to launch a stock listing on its home exchange in 2015.
The Neymar Conundrum: Does Brazil Root for or Against Him (Bloomberg)
Hedge-fund manager Luiz Carvalho can’t quite bring himself to root against his home country of Brazil in next month’s World Cup. Still, it’s awfully tempting. A defeat for the five-time winners of soccer’s championship would be a blow to President Dilma Rousseff’s re-election bid, Carvalho said, bolstering the chances for a new government that would be friendlier to investors after the worst economic performance of any administration since 1992.
Rubenstein’s Carlyle Group buys Texas Competitive debt (New York Post)
The collapse of a giant Texas utility is bringing out the inner vulture of private-equity mogul David Rubenstein. Rubenstein’s Carlyle Group, through its Claren Road hedge fund, snapped up debt in Energy Future Holdings’ Texas Competitive power plants at a steep discount before it went bust last month — hoping to make money when the restructuring played out, sources said. For Carlyle to make a big distressed-debt play is a major departure for the firm.
The Koch brothers can save the Republican Party — by making it more moderate (Washington Post)
Recently, no less a Republican Party icon than Karl Rove canonized Charles and David Koch: “Bless them for all they do,” he wrote in Time magazine. Rove’s blessing is the clearest sign yet that the brothers have been granted admission to the inner sanctum of Republican power. Yet for many years the Kochs were enemies of the GOP, whose political primacy they challenged through the libertarian movement. Writing in 1978 in a magazine he owned called Libertarian Review, Charles Koch called the GOP “the party of ‘business’ in the wors[t] sense” and blasted Republicans for advancing a doomed strategy that “has failed so miserably.”
