Savvy Hedge Fund Manager Buys Hard-Hit Small-Caps (Barron’s)
Mario Cibelli has been picking stocks since his seventh-grade social studies teacher in Middletown, N.Y., told the class how the stock market worked. He had his father drive him to a local stockbroker’s office, where he bought 10 Norstar Bancorp shares for $268.75. A few years later when he was in college, Cibelli sold his bank shares for $836.09 to buy his first car, a used VW Beetle. Cibelli had a good idea of what he wanted to do with his life.
Hedge fund Toscafund buys 10% stake in Hoist Finance worth $37.1m (Opalesque)
London-based hedge fund manager Toscafund Asset Management bought a 10% stake in Stockholm-based debt purchaser and collector firm Hoist Finance, worth $37.1m (GBP 30m). A report from the FT said that by buying into the Swedish company focused on recovering distressed consumer loans, Toscafund fund will have the opportunity to exploit regulatory pressure on European banks to offload their bad debts. The report added the hedge fund group is planning to launch a stock listing on its home exchange in 2015.
The Neymar Conundrum: Does Brazil Root for or Against Him (Bloomberg)
Hedge-fund manager Luiz Carvalho can’t quite bring himself to root against his home country of Brazil in next month’s World Cup. Still, it’s awfully tempting. A defeat for the five-time winners of soccer’s championship would be a blow to President Dilma Rousseff’s re-election bid, Carvalho said, bolstering the chances for a new government that would be friendlier to investors after the worst economic performance of any administration since 1992.
Rubenstein’s Carlyle Group buys Texas Competitive debt (New York Post)
The collapse of a giant Texas utility is bringing out the inner vulture of private-equity mogul David Rubenstein. Rubenstein’s Carlyle Group, through its Claren Road hedge fund, snapped up debt in Energy Future Holdings’ Texas Competitive power plants at a steep discount before it went bust last month — hoping to make money when the restructuring played out, sources said. For Carlyle to make a big distressed-debt play is a major departure for the firm.
The Koch brothers can save the Republican Party — by making it more moderate (Washington Post)
Recently, no less a Republican Party icon than Karl Rove canonized Charles and David Koch: “Bless them for all they do,” he wrote in Time magazine. Rove’s blessing is the clearest sign yet that the brothers have been granted admission to the inner sanctum of Republican power. Yet for many years the Kochs were enemies of the GOP, whose political primacy they challenged through the libertarian movement. Writing in 1978 in a magazine he owned called Libertarian Review, Charles Koch called the GOP “the party of ‘business’ in the wors[t] sense” and blasted Republicans for advancing a doomed strategy that “has failed so miserably.”
