“Nav was always going to the kind of person that I believed would be legendary, potentially legendary in some way in the future,” Paolo Rossi, chairman of Futex and former employer of Nav Sarao, the Flash Crash trader, told Bloomberg TV. Sarao was arrested last week for allegedly causing the May 2010 crash from a computer in his parents’ London basement. Rossi added to Bloomberg that if Sarao is found innocent, he “will be the world’s superstar trader.”
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“This is it,” said former Fed chair Ben Bernanke, who on Wednesday accepted his second consulting job since leaving the Fed and joining the Brookings Institute. Earlier this month he took a position with hedge fund Citadel; this week’s offer is from PIMCO. “There won’t be anymore. They (PIMCO and Citadel) prefer not having me consult too many firms and I personally think working with two firms will be plenty,” Bernanke told CNBC.
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“The role of the activist in the U.S. equity markets ... has been to profoundly improve corporate governance in America,” Citadel CEO Ken Griffin told CNBC Monday at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Los Angeles. Griffin added that in the “big picture, corporate governance in the United States is better than pretty much anywhere in the world,” and that’s thanks, at least in part, to activist investors, who he thinks should have easier access to companies’ boardrooms.
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Jason Karp, CEO and chief investment officer at Tourbillon Capital Partners, said during a panel at the Milken conference that his firm has three types of candidates for hiring: “excellent, dangerous and nuisance.” Dangerous hires are the best to invest in, according to Karp, because they are “impervious to pain” and “reckless.” Openness to change is the most important factor in a new hire, however, Karp says.
