Hedge Fund News: Steve Cohen, Carl Icahn, Anthony Scaramucci

Elliott’s Singer Shifts Marathon Campaign From Private To Public (TheStreet)
When Marathon Petroleum (MPC) announced in October that it was planning to drop its midstream business into its master limited partnership, MPLX LP (MPLX) , over three years, the move was taken partly in response to a behind-the-scenes effort by activist investment fund Elliott Management. But it wasn’t enough. Marathon Petroleum began planning for such a transaction, according to people familiar with the situation, but Elliott, managed by billionaire Paul Singer, didn’t believe the effort was moving fast enough. The activist fund began engaging with Marathon Petroleum in September, roughly a month before the announcement was made, they said.

Billionaire George Soros Lost Nearly $1 Billion In Weeks After Trump Election (The Wall Street Journal)
Billionaire hedge-fund manager George Soros lost nearly $1 billion as a result of the stock-market rally spurred by Donald Trump’s surprise presidential election. But Stanley Druckenmiller, Mr. Soros’s former deputy who helped Mr. Soros score $1 billion of profits betting against the British pound in 1992, anticipated the market’s recent climb and racked up sizable gains, according to people close to the matter.

Ex-Visium Trader Tells New York Jury How He Turned Whistleblower (Reuters)
A former trader at Visium Asset Management LP testified on Thursday about how he turned whistleblower and helped U.S. authorities investigate whether the value of the holdings of one of the firm’s hedge funds had been fraudulently inflated. Jason Thorell, 38, took the witness stand in federal court in Manhattan as the star witness in the securities fraud trial of Stefan Lumiere, an ex-portfolio manager at Visium, which was founded by Lumiere’s former brother-in-law, Jacob Gottlieb. Thorell said Visium employees routinely sought sham quotes from brokers to justify inflated values for debt securities, and deviated from prices set by third-parties on a magnitude beyond what was usual.

Citadel Goes Old School On Bonds (BloombergGadfly)
Citadel Securities has spent the past few years using a high-tech approach to grab business away from big Wall Street banks. Now, Citadel Securities is trying something a little different — a low-tech approach. The Chicago-based dealer wants to go after less-traded areas of the fixed-income market, which rely more on humans talking to one another than computerized marketplaces. Its main debt focus for 2017 is expanding into off-the-run Treasuries, or those that are older and traded less frequently.