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Reuters – Investors, encouraged by a growing number of acquisitions and public floats in the past few months, are keeping a close eye on a coterie of promising startups in Silicon Valley.
An informal poll of venture capitalists and others pointed to six privately held companies as the ripest for acquisition or readiness to go public, out of 34 cited in industries ranging from alternative energy to social networking.
For now, the Silicon Valley Six say they intend to keep growing rather than agreeing to be acquired or go public during the recession.
Tampa Bay Online – Some consider them good capitalists. Others see them as opportunists. Still others call them vultures.
Whatever the name, hedge fund investors likely will be major players in Florida real estate in the next few years, buying up mortgage notes — troubled or not — for a fraction of their original value.
Often, the funds are passive investors. But here in Sun City Center, Jim Biggins is fighting to protect his family business, Cypress Creek Assisted Living Residence, from a Greenwich, Conn.-based hedge fund called Silver Point Capital.
New York (HedgeCo.Net) – In an ironic turning of the tables, divorce lawyer Raoul Felder has lost $200,000 at the hands of a hedge fund, or so he says.
According to the New York Times, the “Duke of Divorce,” is accusing AllianceBernstein of placing his money into a risky hedge fund in order to collect higher fees and commissions for the firm.
According to Felder, he had given the investment firm simple instructions as to what to do with his $750,000. Instead, the firm placed the money into the riskier fund out of sheer “greed and self-interest.”
“It’s like the owner of a restaurant who tells his waiters to push the chopped liver,” Felder said.
The New York City-based AllianceBernstein manages over $590 billion of capital and is a subsidiary of French insurance company AXA.
Julie Scuderi Senior Editor for HedgeCo.Net Email: julie@hedgeco.net
Folks, I want to share some information with you on "hedge funds."
I have wanted to do this for some time now, but it seems each week some other topic pushes this one aside.
Hedge funds are simply large – no, huge is a better term – piles of money. The very rich and very large institutions, like pension funds and banks, give billions of dollars to a "money manager" to play with. These funds aren’t used to produce anything. They are mainly for the manipulation of markets.
Hedge funds are the least regulated of all money institutions. That in itself is scary because when we deregulated the savings and loan industry, greed cost the taxpayer, you and me, in the neighborhood of $750 billion. Then, when we deregulated the banking industry, it cost us, the taxpayers, $500 billion to save banks from their own greed. This was the recent sub-prime mortgage fiasco. And of course the sub-prime problem not only cost taxpayers, it also cost home owners a number too large to write in this space, in lost home value.
Bloomberg- Clad in a beaded, raspberry-colored dress, black leggings and kitten-heeled shoes, comic actress Jackie Hoffman climbed onto the bar at Florent to deliver a tirade against the forces of greed and gentrification that have conspired to drive a beloved restaurant from the map of New York.
“New York, New York, a helluva town. Wherever you look, there’s a stroller around,” she sang.
Hoffman has been a fixture at Florent, the doomed French eatery in the Meatpacking District. For nearly 23 years, Florent Morellet has been feeding inexpensive French bistro food to a devoted clientele.
