Each business day HedgeCo.Net keeps you informed with the top hedge fund industry news, opinion and insight from around the globe. From the latest hedge fund launches, to the impact of regulation, competition, and investor activism - we track the topics and people that make a difference to you.
New York (HedgeCo.Net) – CSX is finding themselves in the middle of another battle, this time with a shareholder who is suing the railroad company along with hedge funds TCI and 3G Capital Partners.
Shareholder Deborah Donoghue is seeking the recovery of “short swing” profits from sales conducted by the two hedge funds between August and September 2007. She is hoping to recover profits from the sale of shares by the funds, before they announced their plan to launch a proxy battle and shake up the Board of Directors.
Donoghue is claiming that TCI and 3G sold 2 million shares of CSX stock and within six months, bought a large amount of shares and derivatives equal to shares of CSX common stock at lower prices.
“Such profits are recoverable on behalf of CSX by plaintiff as a shareholder of CSX, the latter having failed or refused to act in its own right and for its own benefit,” stated the complaint.
Donoghue isn’t the only one who believes the hedge funds didn’t act in good faith. CSX has been in a battle with the two funds ever since they exerted their controlling stakes to take over four board seats on the Jacksonville, Florida based company after a drawn out proxy battle.
CSX had argued that the funds “secretly coordinated” their fight to gain the seats on the board while failing to disclose their full stake in the company. The judge eventually ruled with the hedge funds, allowing them to vote their shares at the company’s annual meeting in June.
Hedge funds are not required to report to the Securities and Exchange Commission, thus these “short-swing” profits were not publicized.
Julie Scuderi Senior Editor for HedgeCo.Net Email: julie@hedgeco.net
Time – Benjamin Graham was well prepared for the Crash of 1929. The now legendary investor had hedged his bets: he would buy preferred stock in a company and sell short common stock in the same company. When stocks crashed in October 1929, common shares fell much faster than preferreds, and Graham made a lot of money off short sales.
But after the crash, most of those preferred shares seemed so cheap that Graham couldn’t bear to part with them, he wrote in his memoirs. They kept falling, and his profit soon turned to a loss. His fund (equivalent to a modern hedge fund) ended the year down 20%. In 1930 it dropped 50.5%; in 1931 16%; in 1932 3%. "The stock market," as Graham resignedly put it in the first edition of his book with David Dodd, Security Analysis (1934), "is a voting machine rather than weighing machine."
It had actually begun voting along with Graham by then — his fund gained 50% in 1933, and he did spectacularly well for himself in the next two decades. "In the short run, the market is a voting machine," he later took to saying, "but in the long run, it is a weighing machine."
Reuters – Japan’s Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, which has watched Morgan Stanley’s share price plunge 58 percent last week, is seeking more favorable terms to its $9 billion deal, a person briefed on the matter said.
The Japanese lender will still buy a 21 percent stake from Morgan Stanley for $9 billion, but will amend the terms to include only convertible preferred shares and no common stock, the source said.
Morgan Stanley is the latest stricken U.S. financial institution to seek refuge in a deal with a larger bank as the worsening credit crisis and accompanying market meltdown has narrowed the options of once stable banks and brokerages.
The Morgan Stanley news comes as Spain’s Banco Santander SA was in advanced talks to buy full control of Sovereign Bancorp Inc in a deal valued at $2.5 billion, according to another source familiar with the matter.
The Times of Trenton – Stocks prices fell sharply again yesterday, ending the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index below 1,000 for the first time since 2003 on speculation banks and real-estate companies are running short of money as the credit crisis worsens.
Bank of America tumbled 26 percent after cutting its dividend in half and saying it plans to sell $10 billion in common stock to brace for a recession. Morgan Stanley, KeyCorp and JPMorgan Chase slid more than 10 percent as investors shrugged off signs the Federal Reserve will reduce interest rates. General Growth Properties, a mall owner, plunged 42 percent on concern it won’t be able to repay debt.
"We’ve approached the edge of the cliff," Leon Cooperman, 65, who manages $6 billion at hedge fund Omega Advisors, said at the Value Investing Congress in New York. "Do we go over the cliff or begin to recede? History says we recede, but there’s no guarantee.
West Palm Beach (HedgeCo.net) - In a Reglatory filing with the SEC, multibillion-dollar hedge fund, Tontine Associates, has bought 5% of trucking giant YRC, equaling 2.97 million shares of YRC common stock, for more than $48 million.
Jeffrey Gendell, founder of Tontine Associates, has made big investments recently in other struggling companies in the region. Earlier this year, he spent more than $11 million to acquire an 8.6 percent stake in Thermadyne Holdings Corp., a struggling producer of metal-cutting and welding equipment based in Chesterfield, Mo.
Gendell also bought more than 400,000 shares of TierOne Corp., a Lincoln, Neb., bank that has lost nearly $100 million in the past four quarters.
Stockpickr.com reports “Gendell’s specialty is picking a macro-styled theme, buying very large positions in companies that benefit from that theme, and then working with or pressuring management to improve shareholder returns”.
Gendell, among other things, is a donor to Duke University and a part-owner of the Cincinnati Reds baseball team.
New York (HedgeCo.Net) – Citigroup Inc. will close its $400 million Tribeca Convertible hedge fund in what will help wind down the $2 billion Tribeca Global Investments Group, according to a report published on Bloomberg.com. The closing of the fund has not yet been made public, but investor redemptions are thought to be the reason for the fund’s demise.
The fund uses a convertible arbitrage strategy, which involves acquiring company bonds that can be converted to common stock which in turn may be shorted. Tribeca Convertible was down a mere 5 percent this year.
This is the latest failure in a string of attempts by Citigroup to offer their clients a broader array of alternative investments. Two months ago they closed the $800 million Old Lane Partners, founded by Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit, after investors redeemed over $200 million.
Citigroup was hit hard by the subprime-related mortgage fallout last summer, forcing its hedge funds to suffer. The bank’s Falcon Strategies funds were closed this year, even after a $500 million influx of capital by Citigroup.
CSO Partners, another hedge fund run by Citigroup also closed its doors this year after suspending investor redemptions. The company wrote down over $15 billion in losses the first two quarters of 2008.
Tribeca Convertible Portfolio Managers Andrew Wang and Jeffry Chmielewski are rumored to be thinking about starting their own fund.
Julie Scuderi Senior Editor for HedgeCo.Net Email: julie@hedgeco.net
HedgeCo.Net is a premier hedge fund database and community for qualified and accredited investors only. Membership on www.hedgeco.net is FREE and EASY. We also offer FREE LISTINGS for Hedge Funds! Be sure to check out our sister sites. For more information, visit www.hedgeconetworks.com
Editor & Publisher – Polar Securities, a Toronto-based hedge fund, disclosed Tuesday that it has purchased a big stake in troubled Sun-Times Media Group (STMG).
In two filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Polar said it has made big purchases of the stock in recent days, and now owns 8,718,163 shares of STMG common stock, or approximately 13.3% of shares outstanding.
Among the Polar entities making the buys is South Pole Capital, which Polar’s Web site describes as a "Canadian distressed securities fund."
STMG, publisher of the Chicago Sun-Times and dozens of other Chicago-area publications, has said it is exploring strategic alternatives including the sale of all or some of the company.
STMG shares were de-listed from the New York Stock Exchange earlier this month and now trade over-the-counter on the Pink Sheet. Shares of the stock (OTC: SUTM.PK) were trading in the early afternoon at 42 cents, down 1 cent, or 2.33%, from its opening.
Polar is headed by Canadian John Paul Sabourin.
STMG Director of Investor Relations confirmed the size of the stake, but declined further comment.
