Andrew Hall’s Astenbeck Capital Management lost 8.3 percent in 2013 and followed it up with a 2.1 percent decline in January, according to Bloomberg. Of course, this was no surprise to Alpha readers. We pointed out in mid-December the fund was down 8.43 percent through November. Hall also lost 3.83 percent in 2011. The two losing years sandwiched an anemic 3.41 percent gain in 2012. Over the most recent three-year period, Hall has also lagged his chosen benchmark — the S&P GSCI (formerly the Goldman Sachs Commodity Index) — including each of the two losing years.

Hall is the guy who shot to fame as an energy trader at Westport, Connecticut–based Phibro, a commodities trading firm that he joined in 1982 as an oil trader when it was a Salomon Brothers subsidiary. There, Hall earned eye-popping returns, and a fair bit of notoriety. In 2009 he got into a public battle over a massive bonus — rumored to be $100 million — from Citigroup, which then owned Phibro. That was the same year that Citi received bailout money from the U.S. government. Citi avoided the huge public relations and political fallout when it sold the Phibro business to Occidental Petroleum Corp.
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Shares of hedge fund favorite Apple climbed 1.40 percent to $519.68 after the Wall Street Journal reported that the maker of the iPad and iPhone bought back $14 billion of its stock in the past two weeks, citing an interview with chief executive Tim Cook.
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Another hedge fund favorite, LinkedIn, dropped 6.29 percent, to $209.40 per share, after the online social networking company delivered 2014 guidance that was below what analysts were working with. A number of analysts then trimmed their forecasts, including Credit Suisse, which cut its estimates and lowered its target price to $274 from $288, according to a note sent to clients. However, it maintained its Outperform rating, asserting its investment thesis “remains unchanged.”
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Shares of Green Mountain Coffee Roasters jumped another 5.50 percent, to $107.72, as investors apparently still like its huge deal struck with Coca-Cola. One Wall Street pro appearing on CNBC speculated that there was suspicious trading in its options ahead of the deal announcement.
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Winton Capital Management reported a U.S. equity portfolio of $11.1 billion at the end of 2013. This is 45 percent of the $24.5 billion the London–based firm was managing altogether. The equity position is one-third larger than the $8.3 billion three months earlier. Its largest stake: Berkshire Hathaway.
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Kenneth Griffin’s Citadel filed amended 13F filings for two earlier quarters several days before the deadline for filing its year-end quarter report. The Chicago hedge fund firm said it had small stakes in Lender Processing Services and Life Technologies at the end of the September period. Its initial third quarter filing did not include Lender Processing, while it only said it own 6500 shares of Life Technologies instead of the more than two million shares cited in the updated filing. It also reported stakes in Caplease, Cooper Tire and Rubber and Life Technologies in its amended report for the June quarter. The initial second quarter report either did not include the three stocks in the revision or disclosed much smaller positions. It is not unusual for investment firms to amend earlier reports, sometimes due to errors, sometimes because they did not want to disclose holdings until they fully completed establishing their positions.
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The HFRI Fund Weighted Composite Index fell 0.6 percent in January. The worst performers were emerging market and CTA/Systematic macro strategies. The HFRI Macro Index lost 1.1 percent in January after dropping 0.4 percent in 2013. The HFRI Emerging Markets Index fell 2.6 percent.