Edward Garden, an executive at Nelson Peltz’s Trian Fund Management who sits on the board of Family Dollar, was one of four independent directors who backed the discount chain’s decision to spurn the $8.9 billion takeover bid from competing retailer Dollar General. Family Dollar issued a statement yesterday saying the company’s directors believe a merger with Dollar General would put the two retailers at risk of an antitrust action. Instead, Family Dollar is going ahead with a plan to merge with Dollar Tree, a smaller competitor. The New York Times says Trian’s support for the Dollar Tree deal might help squelch criticism from Carl Icahn and other shareholders. Icahn has criticized Family Dollar CEO Howard Levine for resisting Dollar General’s offer, implying that Levine is more interested in protecting his job than in boosting the company’s value for shareholders.
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Things keep getting uglier in William Ackman’s joint bid with Valeant Pharmaceuticals International to take over Botox maker Allergan. Valeant and Ackman’s Pershing Square Capital Management have filed a countersuit to Allergan’s accusations of insider trading. The countersuit claims that Allergan is the party that has violated securities laws, by conducting a smear campaign against its suitors and misleading regulators and investors.
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When do you call a family office “premier asset management firm"? When it’s Point72 Asset Management, the private investment firm Steven Cohen set up to manage his personal $11 billion or so in assets after SAC Capital was indicted for insider trading charges. Most family offices are very private affairs, and Cohen’s continued visibility is a sign that he wants to come back to the hedge fund business, a person close to him tells Fox Business. Others who know Cohen — all of whom asked that their names be kept out of the story — told Fox that the departure of Thomas Conheeney from the No. 2 spot at Point72 was another clue. Three top executives have left the family office since April, and those who know Cohen say he might be easing out the executives who were in place at the height of SAC’s legal problems in order to look good in the eyes of regulators. And perhaps it was a strategic move when he replaced Conheeney with Douglas Haynes, formerly of McKinsey & Co, who said in the announcement about his appointment that he and Cohen were going to pursue a goal of being “the industry’s premier asset management firm that adheres to the highest ethical standards.”
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Who could forget Bart Chilton, the rabble-rousing rock-n-roll fan who stepped down as head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission early this year? In announcing his resignation he had some parting words to Wall Street: “The financial sector is so powerful that they will roll things back over time." And in a 2011 speech he referred to high-frequency traders as cheetahs that should be caged. Now Chilton seems to have thrown the key to the cheetahs; he’s working as a paid consultant to a leading high-frequency trading association. Chilton became a senior policy advisor at the law and lobbying firm of DLA Piper in April. Yesterday the Modern Markets Initiative, a Washington advocacy group, announced that Chilton and DLA Piper will be working with the group on “regulatory and public policy matters.” Chilton told CNBC he still believes it’s important to regulate HFT, saying, “I don’t feel dirty so far. But we’ll see.”
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Call it the “four A’s”. No matter how you slice and dice the latest 13F filings, Actavis, Apple, Allergan and American International Group show up among the stocks that are most popular with hedge funds. Goldman Sachs has released its latest list of the 50 stocks that “matter most" to hedge funds; i.e., those with the largest numbers of hedge funds that disclosed the stock as a top holding as of the end of Q2 2014. The top 10 in order: Actavis, Apple, Facebook, Allergan, American Airlines Group, General Motors, Time Warner Cable, American International Group, Microsoft and Hertz Global Holdings.
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UBS O’Connor, the $5.6 billion hedge-fund unit of the Swiss investment bank, cashed in on the high returns on U.S. real estate investment trusts during Q2, Bloomberg reports. The Bloomberg REIT Index rose by 15 percent in the first half of 2014.
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Investor redemption notices were about 1 percent higher in August than July, says SS&C GlobeOp. The hedge fund administration and research firm found that forward redemption notices for August totaled 4.19 percent of assets in hedge funds administered by SS&C GlobeOp on the GlobeOp platform, as opposed to 3.15 percent in July. Bill Stone, chairman and CEO of SS&C Technologies, said the notifications are still moderate, and in line with the activity this time last year.
