Nexans boss faces vote to push him off board (Reuters)
Shareholders in French cable firm Nexans’ will vote on Thursday on a resolution to push chairman and chief executive Frederic Vincent off the board. The resolution, forced onto the annual shareholder meeting agenda by 5.5 percent-shareholder and hedge fund Amber Capital, has won the backing of two major shareholder advisory groups, ISS and Proxinvest. It comes after Nexans reported a loss in 2013 and skipped its dividend for the year after being forced to raise new share capital in October, blaming a lack of growth in Europe and industry overcapacity.
Leading hedge-fund manager’s collection commands $44.6M (Tribune-Review)
Top works from hedge-fund manager Adam Sender’s contemporary-art collection, including pieces by Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince, sold for $44.6 million on Wednesday at Sotheby’s in New York. Nineteen lots from Sender’s collection opened Sotheby’s evening auction of postwar art. The group’s tally exceeded its $21.1 million to $29.9 million estimate. The top lot was Martin Kippenberger’s painting of two men walking arm-in-arm down a street. The work fetched $5.5 million against a high estimate of $4 million.
Jamie Dinan: Look to M&A for best plays (CNBC.com)
For the next great investment ideas, look to the M&A space, York Capital Management CEO Jamie Dinan said Wednesday. “I’m pretty constructive on the market,” he said from the SkyBridge Alternatives Conference in Las Vegas. “As you know, the market this year has been very frustrating for a lot of investors.” While noting that the Russell 2000 and the Nasdaq are down significantly from their highs, Dinan was nevertheless positive in his outlook.
Sotheby’s Sale Draws Cohen as Wynn Buys $28 Million Koons (Bloomberg)
On May 13, Christie’s sold a record $745 million worth of postwar and contemporary art in three hours in New York. The next evening, Sothebys (NYSE:BID)s tallied $364.4 million. Although it was Sotheby’s third-highest postwar-art sale in a decade, the result was half its rival’s haul. “It was day and night,” New York art dealer David Benrimon said about the two auctions. “You cannot compare the material yesterday and today.” Watching the sale were hedge-fund manager Steven A. Cohen; Mary-Kate Olsen, wearing oversized sunglasses, and her fiance Olivier Sarkozy, the half brother of former French president Nicolas Sarkozy; fashion designer Marc Jacobs and gallery owner Larry Gagosian. Activist hedge-fund manager Daniel Loeb, Sotheby’s new board member, yawned as bidding for a Matthew Barney work was underway.
V2 Capital Preps Liquid Alternatives Fund (FINalternatives)
The hedge fund space is changing rapidly, no more so than in the area of liquid alternatives—the term for hedge fund strategies that have been repackaged into 40 Act mutual fund structures. One proponent of the liquid alternatives space is Victor Viner, president of V2 Capital, an investment advisory firm he founded in 2004 that specializes in trading volatility-based equity derivative strategies.
