Activist Investor Provides Twist in Unilever Soap Opera (Reuters)
(Reuters) – Shares in Unilever rose 6% on Monday on reports that activist investor Nelson Peltz has built a stake in the consumer goods giant whose strategy is under scrutiny after a short-lived pursuit of GSK’s consumer healthcare arm. Peltz’s hedge fund, Trian Partners, has built an unspecified stake in Unilever, a person familiar with the matter told Reuters on Sunday. The New York-based fund is known for proposing operational changes at its portfolio companies which have previously included Procter & Gamble.
Millennium has Quietly Minted Billions Off of America’s Passive-Investing Craze. Now Rivals are Racing to Catch Up. (Business Insider)
Down in Puerto Rico, in the cushy Dorado Beach neighborhood outside of San Juan, Glen Scheinberg, a 35-year-old Wall Street portfolio manager, plots and strategizes how to deploy billions in capital to exploit the periodic shifts in the S&P 500, the Nasdaq, the Russell, and myriad other indexes and the trillions in capital benchmarked to them. Betting on which companies will be added and subtracted to stock indexes, and how they’ll be weighted, isn’t a new strategy. Traders have been playing the arbitrage game known as index-rebalance trading since the 1990s.
Lee Enterprises Asks Investors to Help Fight Off Hedge Fund (The Washington Post)
OMAHA, Neb. — Newspaper publisher Lee Enterprises is asking its shareholders to help it fight off a hostile takeover offer from “vulture hedge fund” Alden Global Capital. The publisher of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Buffalo News and dozens of other newspapers, including nearly every daily newspaper in Nebraska, sent a letter to shareholders Monday asking them to support its board nominees in the dispute with Alden. Lee, which is based in Davenport, Iowa, already rejected Alden’s $24 per share offer because it said the $141 million bid grossly undervalues Lee, but the two sides are locked in a court battle over whether Alden will be able to nominate its own directors.
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How One Hedge Fund Manager Is Using The Retail Investing Frenzy To Turn A Profit (Forbes)
Retail investors have become a force to be reckoned with over the past few years, but what does the dramatic increase in retail activity mean for hedge funds and other institutional investors? Moez Kassam of Anson Funds has been tracking retail investing activities and their impacts on the broader market.
Qblue Balanced and Heptagon Capital Launch Article 9 Fund (Hedge Week)
Qblue Balanced (Qblue), a Copenhagen based asset manager, and Heptagon Capital (Heptagon), a London based asset management firm, have jointly launched an Article 9 equity fund – ‘Qblue Global Sustainable Leaders Fund’. The fund went live with USD140.5 million on Wednesday, 12 January 2022 as a sub fund within Heptagon’s USD8 billion Irish UCITS fund umbrella.
Kyle Bass: Invest in Oil Because ‘No Way’ the Stock Market Goes Up in 2022 (Toronto Sun)
Stocks had a great 2021. But according to Kyle Bass, founder and chief investment officer of Hayman Capital Management, 2022 may not be as rosy. “With interest rates (rising) concurrently with quantitative tightening, there’s no way the stock market goes up this year; it probably goes down pretty aggressively, if they stick to that plan,” he said in a recent CNBC interview.
