Cohen’s Fund Returned A Measly 1% Last Year (Bloomberg)
Steve Cohen’s Point72 Asset Management returned about 1 percent in 2016, the second-worst annual performance ever for the billionaire investor, according to people familiar with the returns. The family office, which runs Cohen’s personal fortune and invests across equity teams, suffered along with other multi-manager firms, which struggled to make money in stocks. The high correlation among equities for most of last year, caused in part by the billions of dollars that flowed into index and exchange-traded funds, hurt managers making significant wagers on falling shares. Last year was a comedown for Cohen, who is used to his managers making money no matter the market environment. When he was running his predecessor firm, SAC Capital Advisors, it averaged returns of about 30 percent annually, and posted only one losing year, in 2008, when it dropped almost 28 percent.
Carl Icahn Has Chosen Trolling Bill Ackman Over Making Money (DealBreaker)
Now deep into his golden years, it seems Carl Icahn has decided that there are more important things than making money. Just days away from starting his dream job of managing the largest regulatory bonfire in history on the National Mall, for the past four years he seems to have derived most of his pleasure from torturing friend-turned-enemy-turned-friend-turned-maybe-enemy-again Bill Ackman. Which is good, because for the last three of those four years, Icahn hasn’t been very good at making money. In fact, during that time, he’s actually been worse at it than Ackman, including a 20.3% drop in 2016 compared to Pershing Square’s 13.5% dip. Uncle Carl doesn’t seem to care.
Hedge Fund Founder Scaramucci To Join Trump’s White House As Liaison (Reuters)
Anthony Scaramucci, a hedge fund founder who was a fundraiser in Donald Trump’s election campaign, will join the president-elect’s White House staff as an advisor and public liaison to government agencies and businesses, he said on Friday. Scaramucci, founder of Skybridge Capital hedge fund and a former employee at Goldman Sachs (GS.N), is a member of Trump’s transition team. He will work as a liaison in the White House for state and local governments and for both American and foreign businesses, Scaramucci told reporters in New York. “One of my other personal goals though is to get all of the American people to see President Trump the way I see him,” he added.
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.
