Hedge fund sells stake in Maple Leaf Foods (TheGlobeAndMail)
The unique marriage of Maple Leaf Foods Inc. and activist shareholder Greg Boland ended earlier this month when Bay Street fund West Face Capital Inc. sold its four-year-old stake in the company. West Face sold nearly 16 million shares in the food-processing company in two tranches starting in May, according to people familiar with the stock sale. The bulk of the holding was sold last week. “He’s gone; he’s made his money on Maple Leaf Foods,” said one person familiar with the transaction. West Face is believed to have sold the shares for total proceeds of $300-million, indicating Mr. Boland has doubled the return on his investment.
Armajaro Ward’s coffee-cocoa fund stumbles after strong start to year (Reuters)
Prominent cocoa and coffee trader Anthony Ward’s niche hedge fund stumbled in three of the past four months, giving back a chunk of gains made earlier in the year, the fund’s returns showed on Tuesday. Ward’s Armajaro Group in London saw annual return at its cocoa-and-coffee focused CC+ Fund slip to 13 percent last month from 28 percent in April, letters it sent investors and obtained by Reuters showed. The CC+ Fund is strategically important to Armajaro due to the group’s global prominence as a trader of soft commodities, particularly cocoa and coffee. Overall, Armajaro manages just over $1 billion mostly in commodities.
Texas Teachers Cut Hedge-Fund Target (Finalternatives)
Another major U.S. pension plan is taking a step back from hedge funds. The Teacher Retirement System of Texas has reduced its hedge-fund allocation by one percentage point, to 8%. The move comes just days after the largest U.S. pension plan, the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, announced plans to exit hedge funds entirely. Texas TRS, the sixth-largest public pension in the country with $126 billion in assets, won’t go that far. But it said its new asset-allocation plan, which boosts its risk parity and private markets allocations—both of which include private equity—would help it close the gap between its assets and its liabilities.
LightSquared Losses Accelerate In August (Finalternatives)
While creditors of Harbinger Capital Partners’ wireless internet venture fiddle, the company continues to burn through cash at an alarming rate. With as many as three bankruptcy-exit plans facing court hearings next month, LightSquared lost another $81.4 million last month. The company has blown through $1.6 billion since it filed for bankruptcy nearly two-and-a-half years ago. About half of the new losses were attributed to interest payments. The rest went to a reuse fee for its share of the electromagnetic spectrum—which it is barred from using due to concerns about interference with global positioning systems—depreciation, depletion and amortization.
‘Dr Doom’ Nouriel Roubini’s firm warns of 20% Australian dollar slump (SMH)
The slowdown in China and a tighter federal budget will pull Australia’s growth down to as low as 2 per cent next year, prompting interest rate cuts and a 20 per cent slump in the value of the Australian dollar, a prestigious global forecaster says. Roubini Global Economics, founded by renowned US economist Nouriel ‘Dr Doom’ Roubini, says slowing Chinese growth will hit commodity prices and Australian export volumes, while domestic consumer and investment weakness will continue to drag on the country’s gross domestic product. Dr Roubini himself earned the “Dr Doom” moniker through consistently bearish analysis, exemplified by his accurate prediction of the 2008 US housing market crash and the global financial crisis that precipitated from it.
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