The former chief operating officer for Steven Cohen’s SAC Capital Advisors, Solomon Kumin, is expected to start his new firm, Folger Hill Asset Management, with $1 billion in assets when it begins trading in March, according to Bloomberg. Folger plans to allocate money to in-house managers who will trade stocks, according to the report. Kumin is launching the firm with Todd Rapp, the former chief risk officer at Boston-based Highfields Capital Management, according to the report. Kumin joined SAC in January 2005, according to his LinkedIn page. He previously spent time at Sanford C. Bernstein and Lazard Asset Management.
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Clifton Robbins’ Blue Harbour Group cut its stake in Investors Bancorp by two million shares, to 24.6 million shares, or 6.9 percent of the total outstanding. On January 8, the Greenwich, Connecticut-based activist reported having boosted its stake in the Short Hills, New Jersey-based community bank by 4.3 million shares. Robbins never spelled out any plans it had for the company.
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Charles (Chase) Coleman III’s Tiger Global Management said it raised more than $600 million for its new Tiger Global Internet Opportunities fund and its offshore equivalent, according to regulatory filings. We initially reported in late November that the New York–based investment firm planned to launch the funds on January 1, with a target size of $1 billion to $1.5 billion, according to a letter to clients dated November 25 and obtained by Alpha. It is not clear whether it did in fact get closer to that target.
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Shares of Herbalife dropped another 2 percent on Wednesday, one day after William Ackman said his hedge fund firm, Pershing Square Capital Management, is now making money on its $1 billion short bet on the multilevel marketer of nutrition products. In the interview on CNBC, he said the short would have gone “more smoothly” had Carl Icahn not come in and bought 17 percent of the stock.
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Bank of America’s prime broker unit cut ties with 150 hedge funds last year due to new capital and liquidity rules, according to Bloomberg. The new regulatory rules forced Bank of America, among other firms, to emphasize the more profitable clients and dump the less profitable ones. Bloomberg said in its report that the bank’s spokesperson declined to comment or confirm the number of clients the bank eliminated. Bloomberg explains that the prime brokerage business has become less profitable under Basel III, designed to prevent another global financial meltdown.
