Donald Trump has tapped a small-time hedge fund manager and son of a former Goldman Sachs bigwig to head up his fundraising. Steven Mnuchin, chairman and CEO of Dune Capital Management, was named national finance chairman for Trump’s campaign. “He brings unprecedented experience and expertise to a fundraising operation that will benefit the Republican Party and ultimately defeat Hillary Clinton,” Trump states in a press release, which points out that the two are former business associates. According to Reuters, Mnuchin, a former Goldman Sachs partner and movie financier, has given around $71,000 to Democrats and related committees since 1998, nearly double the $37,000 he gave to Republicans. However, in 2012 he donated $22,500 to Mitt Romney’s joint fundraising committee and $4,800 to Romney’s presidential campaign, according to the report. Mnuchin is the son of Robert Mnuchin, the one-time pipe-smoking, bearded Goldman Sachs partner and investment banker who now owns his own art gallery. During his heyday the older Mnuchin was about as inside Wall Street as anyone, the kind of person Trump would likely be demonizing today.
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Omega Advisors’ Leon Cooperman offered some creepy advice to Donald Trump for when he (likely) debates Hillary Clinton. Speaking on a panel hosted by The Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, Bloomberg reports that the New York hedge fund manager stated: “I have the greatest line for Trump, and he’s dumb enough to use it: ‘If you couldn’t satisfy your husband, how could you satisfy the country?’” Looks like Trump’s pledge to end political correctness — or just plain human decency — has unofficially begun.
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Elliott Management Corp. fired off a letter to the board of directors of CDK Global, laying out plans for the software company that it believes would boost the stock by 72 percent over the next 14 months. The New York multistrategy manager — known for its aggressive activist campaigns, especially at technology companies —stresses that CDK Global, a spinout from ADP that specializes in software for the auto dealer industry, needs to move fast with Elliott’s recommendations, which would “upgrade the organization, streamline the operations, optimize the capital structure and position CDK for growth.”
Elliott urges the company to take prompt operational action, calling on it to reduce cost per head; move operations to lower-cost geographies; restructure its software development, customer support and implementation organizations; optimize management spans of control; leverage inside sales; and rationalize facility footprint. It also calls on the company to increase debt to “repurchase a substantial amount of stock promptly,” both as a one-time event and as a continuing policy. “Given the nature of CDK’s business and its low customer concentration, we believe there is no business purpose for maintaining an investment-grade rating,” Elliott asserts in the letter.
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Barclays raised its price target on hedge fund favorite FleetCor Technologies from $150 to $160 after the payment processing company reported quarterly results that were in line with Wall Street expectations. “Top-line was slightly below our estimate and consensus, but bottom-line beat due to better than expected expenses and a tax rate benefit,” the bank adds in a note to clients. It also maintained its overweight rating on the stock.
FleetCor is a big favorite among the Tiger crowd, with four funds with roots in Julian Robertson Jr.’s Tiger Management among the top-ten shareholders as of the end of the fourth quarter. They include Greenwich, Connecticut-based Lone Pine Capital, the largest shareholder, and New York-based Tiger Global Management, the fourth largest. Tiger Global reaffirmed its commitment to the stock in its first-quarter letter. The other two Tiger funds in FleetCor are also based in New York: Hound Partners and Blue Ridge Capital. “Fleetcor enjoys tremendously ‘sticky’ customers and continues to compound earnings at high rates by utilizing a thoughtful and accretive M&A strategy to grow market share within a fragmented market,” Tiger Global writes in its first quarter letter dated April 29.
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Shares of Square plunged more than 12 percent in after-hours trading after the payment-processing company posted a wider quarterly loss. Investors didn’t seem to care that it raised its guidance. We earlier reported that last month New York-based Coatue Management acquired 5.99 percent of Square, while Daniel Och’s New York-based Och-Ziff Capital Management reported owning 5.2 percent of the stock.
