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.
Reuters – PetroAlgae is one of those many clean-tech companies that seem to burn through cash faster than a Hummer goes through a gallon of gas. Yet something curious is going on with shares of this Melbourne, Florida-based company, which is hoping to make money from turning algae into oil.
Over the past month, the stock price of PetroAlgae has rocketed from $8 to as high as $32.75 on ultra-thin trading of the shares (as of late Monday it had fallen back to around $10).
PetroAlgae boasts a rather healthy $1 billion market value — after being as high as $3.4 billion earlier Monday — even though it has no revenues, a $34 million accumulated deficit and its auditor isn’t sure the company can continue as a going concern.
Globe and Mail – A long-running legal dispute between Fairfax Financial Holdings Ltd. and a group of hedge funds has produced a sideshow involving the chief executive officer of one of Canada’s biggest mutual fund companies.
Fairfax, a Toronto-based insurance conglomerate, wants Bill Holland, the chief of CI Financial Corp., to testify in connection with its bitter lawsuit, which alleges hedge funds conspired to drive down its stock price.
Neither CI nor Mr. Holland is named in that lawsuit, and no wrongdoing is suggested. And while CI says it will co-operate, Mr. Holland yesterday called the situation absurd.
New York Times – For some hedge funds, Lehman Brothers has become the Roach Motel of Wall Street: They checked in, but they can’t check out.
Two weeks after Lehman spiraled into bankruptcy, hedge funds that did business with the Wall Street bank are still fighting to get their money out of the firm. For some, it has become a life-or-death struggle.
Big funds like GLG, Harbinger, Amber Capital and Elliott Associates have varying degrees of exposure to Lehman Brothers.
But even a $6.2 million fund run by students at the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia has been caught up in the bankruptcy. The fund, like its larger counterparts, used Lehman as a prime broker, and no longer has access to its money.
Telegraph.co.uk – Mark McGoldrick, a former Goldman Sachs trader whose track record earned him the nickname ‘Goldfinger’ during his career with the Wall Street bank, is making a comeback with a new $5bn (£2.8bn) fund.
McGoldrick, who famously earned $70m a year ($200,000 a day), but resigned because it was not enough, has asked his old firm to raise money for a super hedge fund that will concentrate on special situations.
While at Goldman Sachs, McGoldrick was head of distressed and special situations investing in Asia. He co-founded and built the firm’s secretive ‘special-situations group’, Goldman’s elite and opaque money-making machine, which buys and sells eclectic assets including British power plants, Japanese golf courses and Thai auto loans.
