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Bloomberg – Pequot Capital Management Inc., once the world’s biggest hedge-fund manager, was cited in at least 44 private reports from exchange watchdogs in the past four years alerting U.S. regulators to potential insider trading, market manipulation or other misconduct, government documents show.
Trades linked to Google Inc., Cox Communications Inc., International Securities Holdings Inc., Premcor Inc. and dozens of other companies prompted surveillance units policing U.S. exchanges to make the referrals to the Securities and Exchange Commission, according to agency records obtained by Bloomberg News. Thirty-six reports flagged possible insider trading. Four indicated possible manipulation and four were labeled “other.”
Reuters – Internet firm Yahoo Inc is "not opposed" to doing a deal that would potentially sell its search business, Chief Financial Officer Blake Jorgensen said on Wednesday.
But he said the search business is deeply intertwined with Yahoo’s other online products and properties, and so any deal, whether a partnership or a sale, would be done for the right reasons and the right economics.
"It’s extremely difficult to draw a line down the middle of the organization and split it into two pieces," Jorgensen told the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet conference.
He did not mention specifically Microsoft Corp, which has repeatedly said it was interested in doing a search deal with Yahoo to compete against market leader Google Inc.
AllAfrica.com – While the bank chiefs and the Central Bank of Nigeria have consistently advised Nigerians to keep faith with the ailing Nigerian Stock Exchange market, an investment adviser is suggesting that Nigerian investors should begin to seek alternative ways of investing their monies for better returns as the bearish trend in the market continues unabated.
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Mr. Olumide Oyetan, a director with the Stanbic IBTC Asset Management gave the suggestion when he delivered a paper titled: "Global financial crisis and its impact on the Nigerian financial market" at the Stanbic IBTC Asset Management limited end of year investors’ forum held in Lagos. According to him, "the benefit of alternative investments is to enhance total return and diversification of investments."
The alternative areas of investments he said are; Private Equity/Venture Capital, Credit/Structured Notes, Emotional Assets (Coins, Jewellery, Fine Art & Wine, etc) and Timber/Farmlands and Oil & Gas. Other options with high returns are "derivatives or physicals such as managed futures, commodities, currencies, hedge fund strategies, trading in volatility, carbon emissions, and weather derivatives among others."
San Francisco Chronicle – A major investor called on Yahoo Inc. to sell its search business to Microsoft Corp. on Wednesday, adding to the pressure on the Sunnyvale Web portal to restart talks with its rival.
Meanwhile, Yahoo agreed to water down an employee severance plan that had been criticized as extravagant, raising speculation that the company was shopping itself for a sale. The changes were made to settle a lawsuit in which shareholders accused Yahoo of devising the severance plan to foil Microsoft’s takeover bid earlier this year.
Ivory Investment Management, a hedge fund that owns a 1.5 percent stake in Yahoo, sent a letter to board members that said a sale would garner $15 billion and help restore the company’s tumbling finances.
Reuters- Officially, a potential $47.5 billion deal for Microsoft Corp to buy Yahoo Inc is over, at least for now.
But longer term, hedge fund managers and analysts said the Yahoo board now faces more pressure than ever to deliver shareholder value in the wake of the collapsed deal and could be forced to reopen merger talks with the software maker.
"This board is toast with a capital T," said Herb Denton, a veteran shareholder activist and head of Providence Capital. "They managed to leave $14.5 billion on the table. Name one shareholder that can be pleased with this outcome, other than the insiders."
The New York Sun – Suspicions that illegal insider trading may have preceded the year’s biggest and most publicized corporate takeover attempt — Microsoft’s hostile $44.6 billion bid for Yahoo — have prompted the Securities & Exchange Commission to commence a trading probe, knowledgable regulatory sources say.
The investigation is just one of nearly a dozen stock trading probes that were recently initiated by the SEC, The New York Sun has learned, and they include trading in some of the best-known names in Corporate America, regulatory sources tell me.
"It looks like some of Wall Street’s bad guys may be at it again; these guys never learn," one source said.
Confirmations of these investigations — which are not of the companies themselves, but rather focus solely on the trading in their stocks — are clearly documented in a series of information-seeking letters (known as Bluesheets) that the commission recently sent to the brokerage community. The Sun has obtained copies of those SEC letters, which detail 11 such probes, including the one into Yahoo’s securities.
