Oh how the mighty can fall so fast in the hedge fund industry. Boaz Weinstein’s Saba Capital Management is down 2.9 percent through June this year after losing money for the fifth straight month. As a result, assets in the New York–based fund, which also lost money the two prior years, have declined to $2.6 billion from $3.1 billion the previous month alone, according to BusinessWeek. Weinstein, who founded Saba in 2009 after serving as co-head of Deutsche Bank’s credit business, recently learned that New Mexico’s public employees pension fund voted to yank $43.5 million from Saba, according to the report. In 2012, Weinstein made his only appearance on Alpha’s Rich List after earning $100 million the prior year, when he posted a 9.3 percent gain in his $4.1 billion Saba Master fund.
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Hedge funds are among speculative investors scooping up depressed Puerto Rican bonds, which have sunk to new lows, according to Bloomberg. Among the buyers: Maglan Capital. Speculation that a major public utility will restructure its bonds is “knocking the daylights out of the rest of the commonwealth’s debt,” David Tawil, co-founder of the $75 million, New York–based fund, told Bloomberg. “I don’t think that that’s a justified relationship.” Maglan gained 1.8 percent in June, bringing its gains for the first half to 14.8 percent, according to people familiar with its returns. It returned 59 last year and 41 percent in 2012.
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The U.S. hedge fund industry is a target of a new British invasion, the Financial Times points out. Among the firms that have created U.S. offices in the past year include Winton Capital Management, Odey Asset Management and Cheyne Capital. In addition, Cube Capital, which has $1 billion under management, recently hired its first U.S. director of marketing and plans to open an office in New York or Boston in 2015, according to the report.
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Point72 Asset Management, the family office of Steven Cohen, disclosed it owns 5.2 percent of LogMeIn, Inc. which provides cloud-based software services.
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John Paulson’s Paulson & Co. sold nearly two million shares of CNO Financial Group, reducing its stake to 4.7 percent of the Carmel, Indiana-based insurance company.
