Hedge fund favorite Facebook continues to be the stock that keeps on giving. The social media pioneer Wednesday evening reported third-quarter earnings that were better than even bullish analysts had been expecting. As a result, the stock jumped more than 2 percent in after-hours trading after climbing 1.33 percent during the regular session, and could lead stocks upward on Thursday. The stock was up more than 13 percent in October and 33 percent for the year, helping to boost performance of a number of hedge funds, and 150 percent since November 2013. At the end of the second quarter, 153 hedge funds owned the stock, second only to Apple, according to Goldman, Sachs. Menlo Park, California-based Facebook is also the third most popular stock among hedge funds with some relation to Julian Robertson Jr.’s Tiger Management, with 17 funds reporting a position, including John Griffin’s New York-based Blue Ridge Capital and Philippe Laffont’s Greenwich, Connecticut-based Coatue Management.
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BH Macro lost 0.6 percent in October. As a result, its U.S. dollar shares are now down 0.23 percent for the year. BH Macro invests substantially all of its assets in the Brevan Howard Master Fund, managed by London-based Brevan Howard Asset Management.
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Richard (Mick) McGuire III’s Marcato Capital Management rebounded sharply in October, gaining 8.4 percent, according to a published report. This cut the San Francisco activist’s loss to 4 percent for the year.
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Shares of Chicago-based Groupon Wednesday plunged more than 26 percent to $2.97 per share after the operator of a daily-deals Website issued disappointing earnings guidance. Groupon now seemingly has lots of competition from other companies that offer daily discounts for restaurants, massages and other consumer services. Two of top-ten holders at the end of the second quarter—the most recent period for which this data is available—were East Setauket, New York-based Renaissance Technologies and New York-based Millennium Management. However, the stock was a very small slice of each of the hedge fund giant’s total equity portfolio. Meanwhile on Wednesday UBS cut its price target on the stock from $5 to $3.20.
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Cantab Capital Partners, the Cambridge, U.K.-based systematic hedge fund manager, has donated five million British pounds—or nearly $7.7 million—to the University of Cambridge to help co-launch the Cantab Capital Institute for the Mathematics of Information. The institute will reside within the university’s mathematics faculty. “The new institute will draw on fundamental techniques from mathematical sciences to tackle head on the challenge of deciphering meaning in the reams of data which surround us,” according to a description in the press release. Its potential benefits are wide, including helping doctors make clinical diagnoses, financial institutions make sensible evaluations of risk, or planners build the cities of the future, according to the announcement. Cantab was founded in 2006 by Dr. Ewan Kirk and Erich Schlaikjer. It manages two computer-driven portfolios—the CCP Quantitative and CCP Core Macro programs. The firm says its merges science with “cutting-edge” technology, “high levels” of transparency and “robust” risk systems.
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Bahrain-based Investcorp announced it will acquire the hedge fund-of-funds business of SSARIS Advisors, based in Wilton, Connecticut, which has $800 million in assets. Four members of SSARIS’ investment team will join Investcorp, whose hedge funds have $4.1 billion in assets under management. This includes assets managed by third-party managers in which Investcorp receives fees based on AUM.
