Loeb Poised For Yahoo! Fight
Who doesn’t like to be in the driver’s seat? Certainly not Third Point’s Dan Loeb. The hedge fund manager, in a rather Machiavellian move, is trying to bogart his and three other directors way onto Yahoo’s board now that former CEO and Chairman Jerry Yang and the coterie of board members who stymied Carl Ichan’s 2008 proxy fight are out of the picture.
Harry Wilson’s on Loeb’s short list to ostensibly pull another General Motors-like turnaround out of a hat along with former NBC Universal head Jeff Zucker and ex-MTV COO Michael Wolf on the media side of the house.
Loeb’s apparently been smelling blood in the water for awhile having taken potshots at Yahoo’s current CEO Scott Thompson who is, reportedly, focused on the non-advertising aspects of the firm’s business.
Macquarie Offers Hedge Funds A Helping Hand
Speaking of smelling opportunities, Macquarie Group, a firm more known for its global infrastructure investments, is now in the fundraising business.
The firm, through its Alternative Investment Strategies arm, is using its street cred in global infrastructure as leverage to diversify its business. Instead of bridges, airports and highways, the firm’s now targeting hedge funds with at least $500 million in assets, a three-year track record and a fundraising target of $1.5 billion.
The Alternative Investment Strategies group has some chops, having already raised $3.1 billion for a host of in-house strategies, but the firm’s taking “baby steps” in the outside world. The group, for the immediate future, will represent no more than five managers on an exclusive basis.
Insurers To Hedge Funds: You’ll Do, For Now
Insurers, deciding they can’t do better with bonds, are taking hedge funds to the prom, in terms of larger allocations to them.
The Federal Reserve’s commitment to keeping interest rates low isn’t doing insurers any favors since they need the cash to back their customer obligations and keep themselves afloat. Hedge funds, despite dismal performance last year, at least hold the promise of some return.
Sure, market volatility took the stuffing out of hedge funds–on average, they lost about 5% of their value in 2011–but volatility goes both ways, after all. Fingers crossed!