JANA Partners, Barry Rosenstein‘s resurgent event driven firm, has a new head of marketing and investor relations. Former FrontPoint Partners marketing and IR head Jordan Gershuny was hired this month to lead JANA’s new client advisory group, which combines the New York City shop’s sales, marketing and IR functions. Michelle Russell Johnson, the director of marketing since May 2011, recently departed to…
Finance: The Great Greek Gamble (CNBC)
In Quentin Tarantino’s film Reservoir Dogs, Mr Pink gets away with the diamonds. His co-conspirators are left bloodied and dying. When he was starting out as a hedge fund manager in the 1990s, Daniel Seth Loeb used to stalk investing chatrooms and message boards with an online persona: Mr Pink. Mr Loeb has always evaded questions on the nom de plume, but it stuck as a nickname. And he appears to be living up to it. This week the 51-year-old, now one of Wall Street’s most successful investors, scooped up a $500 million windfall for his clients in a bond buyback deal with the Greek government.
Top UK equity trader to leave Soros (FT)
One of the UK’s top equity traders is leaving Soros Fund Management, the hedge fund founded by billionaire George Soros. Robert Donald, who headed up investments in European equities as a portfolio manager from SFM’s London office, is to leave at the end of the year. A spokesperson for Soros declined to comment on the move. Mr Donald, who specialises in trading industrial companies and basic materials, is widely regarded as one of the leading equity traders in the UK. He joined Soros in 2009, when his departure from GLG Partners prompted concerns that the firm might suffer outflows as it did when its head of emerging markets, Greg Coffey, left in a high-profile move to rival Moore Capital in 2008.
Brevan Howard Paid Partners 270 Million Pounds Last Year (SFGate)
Brevan Howard Asset Management LLP paid its partners as much as 269.8 million pounds ($436 million) in the 12 months ended in March, more than double the amount it paid them a year earlier, after the hedge fund’s investment performance beat rivals. The highest-paid partner, who wasn’t identified, got 78.9 million pounds, up from 64.8 million pounds in the year earlier, according to a filing by the London-based fund posted Dec. 22 on the U.K. Companies House website. Brevan Howard had 49 designated members during the period, meaning each partner received an average pay of as much as 5.5 million pounds, the filing showed.
A fascination of Wall Street, and investigators (Business-Standard)
You want the headquarters of Steven A Cohen, one of the most successful financial speculators of our time, to look like Dr Evil’s secret lair. But it is just another office-park building, a low-slung affair of tinted glass and red brick, on the southern fringes of Stamford, Conn. From the outside, there’s nothing particularly special about this address, 72 Cummings Point Road. But inside — well, everyone on Wall Street has heard the stories. Some of them are even true. We are, after all, talking about the man known on the Street as “Stevie” — hedge fund magnate, multibillionaire, prodigious art collector and, of late, person of intense interest to federal authorities. Inside his offices, vast fortunes are won and lost. Careers are made and unmade. Type-A egos are inflated and crushed, sometimes in the space of hours. And there, Cohen, a trader with an almost preternatural knack for reading fear and greed in the marketplace, prowls relentlessly for an edge over everyone else.
Titan withdraws funds from SAC Capital (OmanObserver)
Titan Advisors LLC has decided to withdraw all of its money from the hedge fund firm SAC Capital Advisors LP, the Wall Street Journal reported, as SAC faces scrutiny because of several employees linked to insider-trading charges. It’s unclear how much money Titan, an asset-management firm based in New York, had invested with SAC for its clients, although it has $3 billion invested in hedge funds overall, according to a March securities filing. In its article, the Journal cited clients who said they were told that Titan would withdraw investments in SAC.
Hedge Fund Investors Have Another Horrible Year — They’d Be Much Better Off In Index Funds (BusinessInsider)
WHEN it comes to brainboxes, the name “Nobel” has a certain ring. But news that the Nobel Foundation plans to increase its investment in hedge funds, because years of low returns forced it to cut cash prizes in 2012, is one to leave laureates scratching their eggheads. The past year has been another mediocre one for hedge funds. The HFRX, a widely used measure of industry returns, is up by just 3%, compared with an 18% rise in the S&P 500 share index. Although it might be possible to shrug off one year’s underperformance, the hedgies’ problems run much deeper. The S&P 500 has now outperformed its hedge-fund rival for ten straight years, with the exception of 2008 when both fell sharply. A simple-minded investment portfolio–60% of it in shares and the rest in sovereign bonds–has delivered returns of more than 90% over the past decade, compared with a meagre 17% after fees for hedge funds (see chart).
