A billion here, a billion there and the next thing you know you’re talking about real money. Although there is some dispute whether Everett Dirkson ever uttered those words, the folks at Deutsche Bank no doubt were thinking this when they realized that a junior member of its foreign exchange team mistakenly paid $6 billion to a hedge fund, according to the Financial Times. To quote former Texas governor Rick Perry: “Oops.”
The German banking giant got the money back from the manager, whose identity has not been disclosed. However, questions are now being raised about the investment bank’s internal controls and management. It seems the $6 billion trade was processed while the junior person’s boss was on vacation. According to the FT, the individual was supposed to process a net value of trades that day but instead processed a gross figure, which contained “too many zeroes.”
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New York-based Tiger Global Management on Monday disclosed a 17.9 percent stake in Pure Storage, the data storage company that went public earlier this month.
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Shares of Valeant Pharmaceuticals International continued their free-fall, dropping another 7.7 percent on Monday to close at $163.83. This is pennies above its lowest price since early February. The stock, a hedge fund favorite, is now down nearly 40 percent from its early August high. However, it is still up about 14 percent for the year.
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Shares of Weight Watchers more than doubled on Monday after Oprah Winfrey took a 10 percent stake in the diet company. However, while the actress/former talk show host/entrepreneur made a roughly $70 million paper profit on the first day of trading, few if any hedge funds saw this deal coming. No hedge fund was among the top-ten holders, and one is hard-pressed to find any with more than a token number of shares. Jason Karp’s New York-based Tourbillon Capital Partners, however, did own call options on the stock at the end of the second quarter. It is not publicly known whether he still had this position Monday morning.
