Citadel Outpaces Multistrategy Peers (InstitutionalInvestorsAlpha)
Kenneth Griffin’s Chicago-based hedge fund firm, Citadel, continues to deftly maneuver through the turbulence in global financial markets, which has confounded many multistrategy and macro hedge funds this year. In May alone, Citadel’s Wellington and Kensington Global Strategies multistrategy funds gained 1.5 percent. As a result, they are now up 5.4 percent for the year. Citadel’s Tactical Trading fund was up 1.45 percent in May and is up 8 percent…
Net Ponzi Winners May Have to Pay Interest (CourthouseNews)
A trust that profited from Arthur Nadel’s multimillion-dollar Ponzi scheme may owe interest on its investments returns, the 11th Circuit ruled. Arthur Nadel was a hedge fund manager who ran a massive Ponzi scheme that collapsed in 2009. Over 10 years, Nadel raised at least $336 million from investors by misrepresenting the net profits of his funds with false monthly statements showing increases in investor accounts that did not exist. Instead, investor money was used to pay redemptions to earlier investors and management fees to Nadel.
An excerpt from Kate Kelly’s ‘The Secret Club That Runs the World’ (MSNBC)
Pierre Andurand was so comfortable with his $8 billion crude- oil position that he spent the first half of his day doing a hard- core workout with his personal trainer, casually reading the news on a Bloomberg computer terminal, and munching on lean pro-tein and toast at his London town house. It was May 5, 2011, Osama bin Laden had just been killed, and political instability in the Middle East seemed guaranteed to raise energy prices. Andurand made the short walk to his hedge-fund office at midday. Brent crude-oil futures, the commodity market based on petroleum drilled in Europe’s North Sea that he followed most closely, had been hovering in the low $120s that morning, which annoyed him…
Mired in Insider Trading Probes, Cohen Quietly Taps Boies as Counsel (FoxBusiness)
Maybe Steve Cohen isn’t out of the woods after all. FOX Business Network has learned the hedge fund titan has quietly retained famed defense attorney David Boies to help with legal issues Cohen continues to face involving the government’s crackdown on insider trading. Boies’s hiring has yet to be disclosed and the move is significant, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter. Cohen has been the target of criminal and civil probes involving insider trading for the past eight years and nearly a dozen people at his hedge fund SAC Capital have been implicated in the government probe.
Former Chief of Navy SEALs Finds Keystone XL an Easy Terror Target (BusinessWeek)
If reporting on the battle over the Keystone XL pipeline has taught us anything, it’s to expect the unexpected. Even so, we didn’t see this one coming. Hedge fund billionaire Tom Steyer, a climate change activist and staunch opponent of the prospective 1,179-mile pipeline from Alberta, Canada, to Cushing, Okla., has hired retired Navy SEAL chief David “Dave” Cooper to assess how vulnerable the Keystone XL might be to deliberate sabotage. In a 14-page report made public today (but redacted to keep it from being a playbook for aspiring terrorists), Cooper concludes that a small group of evildoers could easily cause a catastrophic spill of millions of gallons of diluted bitumen, or tar sands crude, from the Keystone XL.
