Carl Icahn To Champion Decreased Regulation As Trump Adviser (Bloomberg)
Billionaire investor Carl Icahn said he will be “rallying against overregulation” in his role as a special adviser to President-elect Donald Trump. The corporate raider-turned activist shareholder said Thursday on CNBC that he’ll continue giving Trump advice on regulatory appointments and overhauls. He dismissed questions about perceived conflicts of interest with his investments, saying he’s “not making any policy” or dictating hires. “I give my opinion on that and I think I’m good at that,” Icahn said of appointments. “Over the years you develop instincts for picking the right CEO. Is there anything wrong with me saying, ‘This guy is the right guy for this job at this time’? It doesn’t mean Donald is going to take my advice necessarily.”
The World’s Biggest Hedge Fund Is Creating A Secret Algorithm To Automate Management (CNBC)
Ray Dalio, founder of Bridgewater Associates, is leading a secret project that would automate most of the hedge fund’s management, The Wall Street Journal reports. The software engineering project, which Dalio has called “The Book of the Future,” would send “GPS-style directions” for how employees should spend their time, down to whether they should make phone calls, according to the article. The desire to automate the employee activities at and management decisions of a $160 billion hedge fund may seem like the plot of a science fiction novel. But for Dalio, it’s a way to make his company work more efficiently. This isn’t the first unconventional leadership tactic Dalio has championed.
Hedge Fund Math: Heads We Win, Tails You Lose (The New York Times)
When do 1.5 and 16 add up to 72? That’s the riddle confronting investors in Pershing Square Holdings Ltd., the closed-end fund run by the prominent activist investor Bill Ackman. In a letter to investors this month, Mr. Ackman disclosed that through the end of November, the fund had declined 13.5 percent this year after accounting for fees. (Pershing Square Holdings shouldn’t be confused with Pershing Square L.P., Mr. Ackman’s hedge fund, although the two vehicles have the same investment strategy.) That’s obviously a big disappointment, considering the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index was up 7.6 percent over the same period. But that’s not what some big investors were complaining about to me this week. In the same letter, Mr. Ackman reported that during the nearly four years since it began, Pershing Square Holdings had gained a total of 20.5 percent.
Platinum Partners Fraud Case Has Investigators Casting Wide Net (The Wall Street Journal)
Federal investigators are asking questions about a billionaire New York hedge-fund manager and a Bermuda reinsurer as they examine the alleged fraud by hedge fund Platinum Partners. On Monday, six Platinum executives, including chief investment officer Mark Nordlicht, were arrested and charged with faking the firm’s investment performance. The allegations against Platinum, which had more than $1 billion under management, outline what would be one of the largest investment frauds since Bernard L. Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. As part of the Platinum probe, prosecutors are casting a wide net.
ICAHN: If We’re Going To Get Into A Trade War With China, Maybe It Is Better To Do It ‘Sooner’ (Business Insider)
Billionaire investor Carl Icahn – one day after being named a special adviser to President-elect Donald Trump – said it might be better to have a trade war with China “sooner” so the US could “get it over with.” During a lengthy interview with CNBC’s “Fast Money Halftime Report,” Icahn was repeatedly asked if he was concerned about the market – which has shot up considerably since Trump won the presidency. Icahn admitted he was “concerned about the market in the short term” because there are “so many factors here that you have to worry about.”
WALL STREETER OF THE YEAR: Anthony Scaramucci (Yahoo Finance)
Anthony Scaramucci had his longest, highest-volatility call option come into the money on Nov. 8. That call option, of course, was Donald J. Trump beating Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election. Scaramucci, 52, is the founder and co-managing partner of SkyBridge Capital, a fund of hedge funds with $11.8 billion in assets under management. He’s also on Trump’s transition team as an executive committee member. “The Mooch,” as he’s affectionately called, is one of the more visible figures on Wall Street. A former CNBC contributor, he now makes frequent appearances on Fox Business Network where he also co-hosts “Wall Street Week,” the iconic financial program he resurrected. He published his third book this year, “Hopping Over The Rabbit Hole.”
Where Carl Icahn the Adviser and Investor Meet (The Wall Street Journal)
Billionaire investor Carl Icahn, who has corporate holdings across a variety of industries overseen by numerous federal agencies, faces multiple potential conflicts as he advises the incoming Trump administration on regulatory matters. President-elect Donald Trump on Wednesday named Mr. Icahn a special adviser to the president on overhauling federal regulation, expanding the activist investor’s potential influence in the Trump administration. Mr. Icahn was already informally advising Mr. Trump on such matters as appointments for departments, commissions and agencies that oversee American business. In one sign of the market’s view on Mr. Icahn’s new appointment, his own publicly traded entity, Icahn Enterprises LP, rose 6.9% to $61.89 Thursday, among its biggest gains of the year.
HD Supply: In Trump We Trust? (BloombergGadfly)
Donald Trump may be able to do more to create value at HD Supply Holdings Inc. than Jana Partners can. Jana, the activist hedge fund founded by Barry Rosenstein, disclosed an 8.1 percent stake in the supplier of sewer pipes, construction tools and maintenance-repair products in October and said it may pursue options to create shareholder value. The stock rose about 2 percent that day — but it’s climbed about 28 percent since the U.S. election as investors piled into a company that stands to be one of the biggest beneficiaries of corporate tax reform, infrastructure investment and an inflation revival under a President Trump.
