Ken Griffin’s Chicago-based Citadel has gotten off to a great start this year. Its two main multi-strategy funds—Wellington and Kensington—rose 3.4 percent in January, whIle its Global Equities fund advanced 2.9 percent and its Global Fixed Income Fund jumped 5 percent.
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Jeffrey Altman’s Owl Creek Asset Management has placed bearish bets on Denmark’s sovereign bonds, figuring it is headed for a debt crisis, says Bloomberg. The firm, whose hedge fund, Owl Creek Overseas, was among the top performers in 2013 with a 49 percent gain, also bought credit default swaps on Danske Bank A/S, reportedly the country’s biggest lender. The wire service says Altman disclosed these trades while speaking on a panel at a conference last week in Palm Beach, Florida. According to the Bloomberg report, Danes owe creditors 321 percent of disposable income.
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Keith Meister’s Corvex Management and Eric Mandelblatt’s Soroban Capital Partners have raised their combined stake in Williams Cos. to 7.14 percent of the total shares outstanding. Including cash-settled swaps and options, their stake is 9.96 percent. In a regulatory filing, the activist investors state that the waiting periods under the Hart Scott Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act of 1976 have expired, so they plan to “promptly exercise” their deeply in-the-money physically-settled call options. They also plan to acquire additional shares. In the filing, the investors say they have had discussions with the company’s management about adding Mandelblatt and Meister to the board. However, the various parties have not reached an agreement. Even so, the investors say they intend to nominate several individuals to the board at the 2014 annual meeting.
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Up and coming activist hedge fund Sachem Head is stirring up its first target — Helen of Troy, a consumer goods company. In a letter fired off to the board of directors, the hedge fund founded by Pershing Square alum Scott Ferguson stressed that the stock is “materially undervalued,” lambasted the board for its unwillingness to respond to his inquiries regarding potential strategic combinations and recommended ways to maximize shareholder value, including putting the company up for sale or creating “a more appropriate capital structure” that would “create substantial value for shareholders.”
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Tiger Cub favorite Time Warner said it boosted its stock repurchase plans by $5 billion and a 10 percent increase in its dividend. At the end of the third quarter, the stock was the second largest holding of O. Andreas Halvorsen’s Viking Global Investors (which, in turn, was Time Warner’s twelfth-largest shareholder) and the third-largest holding of Phillipe Laffont’s Coatue Management.
