Why Aren’t There More Female Hedge Fund Managers? (BusinessWeek)
Why aren’t there more women running hedge funds? The money’s good, and the lifestyle would seem to lend itself better to balancing family demands than more traditional Wall Street jobs, with less face time and greater emphasis on money-making rather than bonding on the golf-course… Over at DealBook, Whitney Tilson, one of the more thoughtful members of the hedge fund brotherhood, makes an attempt to answer the question of why his field continues to be so male-dominated. ”If women are, in general, better suited to be successful investors, then this is a strange market inefficiency,” Tilson writes. “It would be like discovering that tall people were vastly underrepresented in the NBA. What could possibly explain this?”
How Meditation Makes Ray Dalio Feel ‘Like A Ninja In A Fight’ (BusinessInsider)
Billionaire Ray Dalio, the founder of hedge fund behemoth Bridgewater Associates, has been practicing Transcendental Meditation (TM) for 42 years. “Meditation, more than any other factor, has been the reason for what success I’ve had.” Dalio spoke at a Transcendental Meditation Town Hall last night at the AXA Equitable Building in Midtown Manhattan along with other leaders and celebrities. Money from the event will go toward teaching at-risk youth and veterans meditation.
FCA Insider Trading Probe Sees Julian Rifat Bailed Until May (IBTimes)
Julian Rifat, a former hedge fund trader who appeared at Southwark Crown Court answering eight counts of insider trading, will return to court in May. Rifat, formerly an execution trader at Moore Capital Management, remains on unconditional bail until the next hearing, when he is expected to enter a plea. He was originally arrested back in 2010 as part of the Financial Conduct Authority’s Operation Tabernula, which is thought to be the UK’s largest investigation into inside trading.
Blackstone Raises $1.4 Billion for Stakes in Hedge-Fund Managers (BusinessWeek)
The Blackstone Group L.P. (NYSE:BX), the world’s biggest manager of alternative assets such as real estate and private-equity funds, raised an initial $1.4 billion to buy stakes in hedge-fund firms, Vice Chairman Tom Hill said. Blackstone is seeking $3 billion for the strategy, which will target firms with $3 billion to $4 billion in assets, Hill said today at Credit Suisse Group AG (NYSE:CS)’s financial-services forum in Boca Raton, Florida. New York-based Blackstone is seeing opportunities to buy stakes at valuations of 4.5 to 5 times cash flow, he said.
Hedge funds enjoy January performance boost -SS&C (Reuters)
Hedge fund returns grew 1.39 percent in January, recovering from December’s four-month low and outperforming many leading developed market stock indexes, the SS&C Hedge Fund Performance Index showed. Funds also saw money trickle back in February, with SS&C’s separate GlobeOp Capital Movement Index, which calculates monthly hedge fund subscriptions less redemptions, rising 0.94 percent, the financial software firm said in a statement. “Net flows were positive for the month, with subscriptions outpacing redemptions by two to one,” said Bill Stone, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, SS&C Technologies.
Asian Hedge Fund Capital Hits Record US$112B (Finalternatives)
Total capital in Asian hedge funds has hit a record US$112.3 billion, according to the latest HFR data. Inflows and performance in late 2013/early 2014 drove total investor capital to surpass the record level set in 2007. Investors allocated US$4.2 billion of new capital to the region’s hedge funds in Q4 2013, the highest quarterly inflows since HFR began tracking in Q108. Full-year 2013 inflows totaled US$10.5 billion, also a calendar year record.
Hedge fund names Cliffs CEO candidate, to nominate new directors (Reuters)
An activist investor squaring off with Cliffs Natural Resources Inc (NYSE:CLF) named its preferred candidate to become chief executive of the hard-hit miner on Wednesday and said it planned to nominate a majority slate of directors for election to the board. Hedge fund Casablanca Capital, which owns about 5.2 percent of Cliffs, said it is backing Lourenco Goncalves, former chief executive of Metals USA, to take the top job at Cliffs.
Blue chip market is still the US: Lee (CNBC)
Return of the arbs: Activists target struggling hedge funds (InvestmentWeek)
While the investment trust sector had a bumper year in 2013, raising a record £7.4bn in IPOs, the hedge fund sector trailed far behind, raising just £1.6m. Discounts have remained large, attracting the attention of arbitrage investors looking to wind up poorly-performing funds and collect the net asset value of their investments. In particular, arbitrageurs are exploiting a loophole allowing investors to buy into hedge funds’ more liquid sterling share classes, before converting into a smaller dollar or euro share class and forcing a wind down or payout at NAV.
George Soros Wondering If That’s All Adriana Ferreyr’s Got (Dealbreaker)
When one becomes a multi-billionaire, there are a few questions he or she has to ask him or herself. The first is, will I still eat my food with my own two hands or will I have someone cut it and feed it to me? Will I put my pants on myself each morning, or would it be nice to be have someone dress me, French aristocracy-style? Will I walk around like I did before becoming a man or woman of immense wealth, or will I be carried, leaving my legs to be simply ornamental?
Elon Musk Sides with Carl Icahn on eBay (EBAY) PayPal Split (StreetInsider)
eBay Inc (NASDAQ:EBAY) is modestly higher Wednesday as Tesla Motors Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA) CEO Elon Musk is siding with Carl Icahn on a spinoff of PayPal. Importantly, Musk was one of the cofounders of the payment service. In a Forbes cover story, Musk is quoted as saying, “It doesn’t make sense that a global payment system is a subsidiary of an auction website. It’s as if Target owned Visa Inc (NYSE:V) or something.” PayPal, he adds, “will get cut to pieces by Amazon Payments, or by others like Apple and by startups if it continues to be part of eBay.”
Loeb’s Third Point blasts Dow Chemical ‘lack of transparency’ (Reuters)
The Dow Chemical Company (NYSE:DOW)‘s “lack of transparency” makes it difficult to determine whether the petrochemical giant should be split up or kept together, hedge fund titan Daniel Loeb said on Wednesday. The harsh words escalate the tension between the largest U.S. chemical maker and Loeb, operator of the $14 billion Third Point hedge fund. Loeb, who last month said Dow Chemical had become the largest equity investment held by Third Point and urged the company to spin off its lucrative but slow-growing petrochemical unit and focus on specialty materials, issued the remarks a day after Dow Chemical said an internal review found breaking up the company would not help shareholders.
Robert Wood Johnson’s Brian O’Neil on Ethical Hedge Fund Investing (InstitutionalInvestorsAlpha)
As chief investment officer of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Brian O’Neil is responsible for the financial vigor of the fourth-largest private foundation in the U.S., with an endowment of $9.5 billion. RWJF trails only the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Ford Foundation and the J. Paul Getty Trust. When O’Neil, 61, joined RWJF in 2003, after two decades at the Equitable Life Assurance Society, he found a board of directors that had approved alternative investing back in the 1990s. But it was O’Neil’s job to come up with alternatives that didn’t conflict with the foundation’s mission of being, as the bylaws state, a steward of private resources that must be used…
Connecticut commits to 3 hedge fund-of-funds managers (PIOnline)
Connecticut Retirement Plans & Trust Funds, Hartford, agreed to make a commitment of up to an aggregate $175 million to three hedge fund-of-funds managers for the Connecticut Horizon Fund portfolio, confirmed Denise Nappier, the state treasurer and principal fiduciary for the $27.1 billion state pension system, in an e-mail. Appomattox Advisory, Grosvenor Capital Management and Morgan Stanley (NYSE:MS) Alternative Investment Partners were selected. Mandate sizes have not been determined. The Connecticut Horizon Fund provides opportunities for Connecticut-based and emerging investment management firms as well as investment firms owned by women and minorities.
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