Tags: Autos, Banks, Barack Obama, Ben Bernanke, Euro, Fed, Greece, Interest Rates, Politics, SEC, Short selling, Spain, Toyota
Tags: Antitrust, Autos, Bank failures, Banks, Bonuses, Compensation, Consumer Reports, Credit Suisse, FDIC, GM, Goldman Sachs, Google, recalls, SEC, Short selling, Toyota
Tags: Bubbles, China, CNBC, Hedge funds, Jim Chanos, Short sellers
Tags: China, Crashes, Jim Chanos, New York, Private equity, Real Estate, Short sellers
Tags: Ben Bernanke, Bill Fleckenstein, Fed
Tags: CNBC, Jim Chanos
With the huge market dislocations in 2008, hedge funds didn't have to lose money to still have substantial redemptions: Short seller Jim Chanos' Kynikos Associates, which "had a good year" in 2008, apparently suffered an outflow of 20% of assets. Such was the lot of being one of the seemingly small number of firms that hadn't blocked investor redemptions. "We were like an ATM machine" he joked according to Reuters.
Tags: Hedge funds, Jim Chanos
Congratulations are in order: Not everyone is losing money in Barclays as the stock tanks. London hedge fund Lansdowne partners made £12m in just four days….
Lansdowne Partners, which also profited from the fall in the share
price of Northern Rock at the height of its problems, sold Barclays
shares last Friday – when the bank lost almost a quarter of its value
in frenzied trading – and bought them back again on Wednesday after
they had fallen by almost £1.
The disclosure is likely to fuel
the row between politicians and the Financial Services Authority which
lifted a ban on short-selling last Friday. The ban was introduced last
September to try to protect the share price of HBOS which was in the
throes of a rescue takeover by Lloyds.
Hedge fund made millions betting on Barclays crash – The Guardian
Tags: Barclays, Hedge funds
Jim Chanos thinks that President-elect Barack Obama's infrastructure plans are bound to disappoint, so he's shorting those plays in anticipation.
Tags: hedge fund, Hedge funds, Jim Chanos, Kynikos, short seller, Short selling
Copper River Management, the fund founded by legendary short seller David Rocker and which is currently run by his former Rocker Partners co-manager Marc Cohodes, is liquidating with remaining funds being returned to investors. The fund was said to have been down over 50% In the market turmoil over the past couple of months with results exacerbated by the SEC imposed short selling restrictions as well as its inability to unwind derivatives where Lehman was the counterparty….
Tags: Christopher Cox, Credit Crunch, Rocker Partners, Toe Tags
Famed short seller Bill Fleckenstein is shutting down his short fund saying that "compelling opportunities on the short side are not as abundant as they were just a few months ago":
Fleckenstein said he wants to widen his focus and plans to spend next year setting up an investment vehicle that "won't be a hedge fund, which hopefully will be available to everyone." He said his wife is "especially happy about this potential change."
Fleckenstein closing up his short-only hedge fund – Reuters
Tags: Bill Fleckenstein, Hedge funds
You should read the fascinating WSJ article on Morgan Stanley that details what what happened days after Lehman Brothers collapsed. It explores the massive piling on on all fronts that caused the almost fatal death spiral in its stock.
It details who was trading the firm's CDS - including JP Morgan, Merrill Lynch, UBS and Deutsche Bank on the banking side, and King Street Capital, Owl Street Capital on the hedge fund side. There were those who were shorting the stock — including Dan Loeb's Third Point LLC and Millennium Partners. There were those making pitches to hedge funds, to steal prime broker business
away, including JP Morgan (which drew a rebuke from John Mack to Jamie
Dimon), Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse and UBS. There were those who were bailing on Morgan's prime brokerage business – including Millenium Partners, Third Point, Owl Creek. And there was the breakdown in the 20 year relationship between famed short seller Jim Chanos after John Mack groused to the SEC and employees, blaming the shorts (many of them MS clients) for attacking his stock. Chanos pulled over $1 billion out of Morgan….
Tags: Credit Crunch, Credit Suisse, Dan Loeb, Izzy Englander, Jamie Dimon, Jim Chanos, John Mack, JPM Chase, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley
One of the first funds to actually shut down over the disastrous hedge trade between Volkswagen and Porsche shares — that resulted in the mother of all short squeezes in Volkswagen stock — has emerged. The $240 million Trident European Fund, run by $3.5 billion JO Hambro, is liquidating after suffering a 25% loss in October. The fund, managed by Basil Postan, was down 39% for the year and had thrown off an average 8.4% annual return since opening 10 years ago.
Charlie Rose spoke to Pershing Square Capital's Bill Ackman on Nov 11 (last night). It's a great interview — he talks about the state of hedge funds, GM, credit default swaps, the rating agencies, the short selling ban, FNM/FRE, etc.
Tags: Activist Investing, Bill Ackman, Credit Crunch, Credit default swaps, Fannie Mae / Freddie Mac, GM, Hedge funds, Ratings
Porsche, however, apparently dismissed those suggestions as a "fairy-tale". Hmmmmm. So it would appear that Porche fibbed. According to the Economist:
Tags: Hedge funds
Tags: Hedge funds, SAC Capital
According to WSJ sources, those caught in the move include Greenlight Capital, SAC Capital, Glenview Capital, Marshall Wace, Tiger Asia, Perry Capital and Highside Capital.
Tags: Greenlight Capital, Hedge funds, Perry Capital, SAC Capital
We’ve gotten emails asking where we’ve been in the past couple of days since posting has been light. Yes, we’ve been AWOL. Given the choice to watch the market continue to crap out or to go to the Value Investing Conference to listen to the likes of Bill Ackman and Carl Icahn, we actually donned a suit and chose the latter. Mea culpa. 
It was an interesting conference indeed. A lot of glum faces, a lot of nervous jokes about the state of the market and comparisons to the crash in ‘87, just about universal complaining about the misguided short selling ban (at least among those we spoke to, although maybe that’s a function of the company we keep), but there was also a sense of optimism, that maybe all of the moves in the past week or so might actually start to take hold. And people are also talking about the many opportunities they’re seeing in stocks as well as the astronomically huge yields on some of the high yield bonds out there. After a two year period where we’ve been extremely bearish, we’re even starting to become a bit more optimistic. We don’t think that the market has bottomed yet, but we’re more likely to nibble.
Tags: Bill Ackman, Carl Icahn, Conferences, high yield bonds
CNBC says the short sale ban is likely to be extended by the SEC, even though from what we can see, there doesn’t seem to be much evidence that those *nasty* short have been the problem. Instead, the ban has had chilling effects on legitimate hedging strategies. Ridiculous.
Has Wall Street already found a way around Chris Cox’s silly and misplaced short selling ban? Bankers, including those said to work at Citigroup, have apparently been hard at work on a derivative based end run tactic. They’re supposedly making their pitches to hedge funds:
Tags: Citigroup
 |
Attorney General Andew Cuomo is expanding his probe of short sellers to also include the credit default swap market. According to the WSJ: Mr. Cuomo’s office Thursday morning subpoenaed data from three providers of pricing and trading information that operate in the swaps market: Markit Group Ltd., Depository Trust & Clearing Corp. and Bloomberg LP. His office has already subpoenaed multiple hedge funds from New York, Texas and London, among others, seeking information on their activities in short-selling and CDS contracts. Broker dealers have cooperated with the office in providing data about these markets. |
Tags: Andrew Cuomo, Credit default swaps, Politics
Misplaced blame: Ambac is down over 50% in just a few days and not a new short seller in sight; It’s one of the stocks that’s on Chris Cox’s verboten list of financials…Could it be that this (and other financials) might actually have been falling of their own weight instead of from short selling pressure?
“Taking
the short sellers out of the market doesn’t change the fundamentals,” said Dean
Gulis, part of a group that manages about $3 billion for Loomis Sayles & Co.
in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. “It’s wrong to say that short selling of shares
was the biggest contributor to the financial crisis.”
Short-Sale Ban Fails to Save Ambac From 50% Plunge – Bloomberg
Tags: Charts
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| Salem witch hunt |
Tags: FSA, Hedge funds
With bans on short selling wreaking havoc on hedge funds, some are looking to fight back. A group of hedge funds plans to sue the UK’s FSA over losses incurred after the ban was imposed. According to the Daily Telegraph:
Tags: FSA, Hedge funds
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