Hedge Fund

Hedge funds bought another 65 million barrels of petroleum futures and options in the week to March 19, taking total purchases over the last 10 weeks to 384 million barrels, […]

In 2007, Warren Buffett, the famed billionaire investor made a $1 million bet that an S&P 500 stock index fund would outperform a basket of hedge funds over the course of a decade.

The index fund returned 7.1% compounded annually over the 10-year period, easily beating the 2.2% average return of a basket of funds picked by asset manager Protégé Partners, according to The Wall Street Journal. The Wall Street Journal reported that when the New York Stock Exchange closed on Friday, Dec. 29, Buffet, chairman of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., had won the bet – and it wasn’t close.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has already changed some activities, including parts of finance like fraud prevention, but not yet fund management and stock-picking. That seems odd: machine learning, a subset of AI that excels at finding patterns and making predictions using reams of data, looks like an ideal tool for the business. Yet well-established “quant” hedge funds in London or New York are often sniffy about its potential. In San Francisco, however, where machine learning is so much part of the furniture the term features unexplained on roadside billboards, a cluster of upstart hedge funds has sprung up in order to exploit these techniques.

Activist investor RBR Capital Advisors, supported by Gaël de Boissard, a former Credit Suisse investment bank co-head on Tuesday confirmed it has built a position in Credit Suisse and has been talking with the Swiss bank’s management. RBR Capital Advisors will reveal its plan later in the week at a conference in New York, the Financial Times reported.

According to the report, the plan will offer the argument for a three-way split of Credit Suisse into an investment bank, an asset management group and a wealth manager accommodating the Switzerland-based bank’s retail and business banking operations.

David Perry plans to end the main operations of TeamCo Advisers LLC by early 2018 and ultimately shut the firm, he told Reuters in an interview, making his San Francisco-based business the latest casualty in the struggling fund of hedge funds industry.

Firms like TeamCo that manage portfolios of hedge funds for wealthy individuals and institutional investors have come under pressure as the performance of their underlying investments has lagged, making it harder for them to justify their extra layer of fees.

The founder of the world’s largest hedge fund he believes that there’s a bubble in the bitcoin market. Ray Dalio is the founder of Bridgewater Associates, which according to recent rankings is the biggest hedge fund by total assets under management. Per its website, Bridgewater manages around $160 billion in assets.

Global macro fund manager Hugh Hendry has taken the “difficult decision” to close his flagship hedge fund after 15 years, in a move which will see Eclectica Asset Management close as well, Citywire Selector has learned.

In a shareholder letter seen by Citywire Selector, the London-based investor, who is founder and chief investment officer of Eclectica Asset Management, said the Eclectica fund would be closed and, ultimately, the firm would shut down as well.

Billionaire activist investor Daniel Loeb’s Third Point LLC hedge fund has taken $3.5 billion stake in Nestlé. The stake amounts to about 1.25% of swiss company’s shares.

The hedge fund is proposing Nestlé set a formal profit margin target of 18-20 per cent by 2020, boost its debt to buy back shares, put up for sale non-core products in its portfolio, and sell its 23 per cent stake in cosmetic maker L’Oréal, a stake with a market value of about $27 billion. Nestle’s current operating margin is about 15 per cent. Nestlé did not respond immediately to requests for comment.