Tiger Asia Hedge Fund Ordered to Repay $5.8 Million Over Illegal Trading (NYTimes)
A court on Friday ordered Tiger Asia Management, the regional arm of the New York-based hedge fund Tiger Management, to repay nearly $6 million to more than 1,800 investors after the fund admitted to insider trading and share price manipulation. Responding to charges brought by Hong Kong’s Securities and Futures Commission in 2009, Justice Jonathan Russell Harris ordered Tiger Asia and two of its senior officers, Bill Hwang and Raymond Park, to pay 45.3 million Hong Kong dollars, or $5.8 million, as restitution to the investors who were on the other side of its illegal trades in the shares of Bank of China and China Construction Bank.
The hard-landing hedge fund: A new way to bet against housing (TheGlobeAndMail)
A Toronto financial firm is creating a hedge fund that will allow Canadian investors to bet on a housing slump, a move that underscores the skepticism that exists about policy makers’ ability to engineer a soft landing for the real estate market. The proposed fund by Spartan Fund Management Inc. is catering to investors with an outlook that is at odds with the Bank of Canada, which has said it is growing more comfortable with the state of the property market. Governor Stephen Poloz said in a speech last week that “the Bank expects a soft landing in housing,” though he acknowledged the risk that household borrowing will continue to climb, setting the stage for a correction.
Former MBTA pension fund chief recommended $25 million hedge fund investment that went bust (Boston)
Nine months after Karl E. White left his job as chief of the MBTA pension fund to join a New York hedge fund, he visited his former colleagues in Boston to pitch them on a new investment idea. White, in his new job as chief investment officer of Fletcher Asset Management, told the authority’s pension board members in 2007 that he had devised an investment fund just for them, and that it was relatively low risk. They gave their prominent former leader $25 million to invest.
Honey Badger Hedge Fund: Hackers Predict Stock Market With Open Source Mojo (Wired)
Somewhere, out on the web, there’s a secret Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR) account that’s one hell of a stock picker. So far, the thing has recommended seven stock trades — all to a private group of traders — and each one of them has turned a profit. The account isn’t run by a bunch of Ivy League MBAs scheming their way up the Wall Street ladder in lower Manhattan. It’s driven by a computer algorithm cooked up by three guys at a hacker school in San Francisco. They call it the Honey Badger algorithm, after that ongoing internet meme that espouses going your own way. And it shows that, thanks to the rise of open source software and cloud computing, anyone can compete on Wall Street. At least for a time.
Microsoft Portfolio Manager, Seeking To Set Up His Own Hedge Fund, Charged With Insider Trading (Forbes)
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission just released a statement that it’s charged a senior portfolio manager at Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) -0.88% and one of his friends with insider trading and said the duo made nearly $400,000 on a scheme that kicked off in April 2012. Microsoft employee Brian D. Jorgenson obtained confidential information about upcoming company news through his work in Microsoft’s corporate finance and investments division, the SEC said. Jorgenson then passed on tips to a friend named Sean T. Stokke, “in advance of the Microsoft announcements, the most recent occurring in October. After Stokke traded on the inside information that Jorgenson provided, the two equally split the illicit profits in their shared brokerage accounts. They made joint trading decisions with the goal of generating enough profits to create their own hedge fund.”
Hedge funds eye Citi (CNBC)
