It's not looking good at star analyst Meredith Whitney's hedge fund, Kenbelle Capital, according to Bloomberg's Max Abelson.
Since her fund started trading in November 2013, it has lost two top executives, and a major investor is asking for his money back.
Whitney became the talk of Wall Street during the financial crisis, when she correctly called that Citigroup would be forced to cut its dividend. After that she predicted that the US was facing a deluge of municipal-bond defaults. That never happened.
The launch of her hedge fund was met with a mix of excitement and mocking. She opened with $50 million in cash and targeted returns of 12% to 17%. Instead she lost 4.5%, according to Abelson.
Executives Brittani Caetano, the fund's CEO, and Stephen Schwartz, an SAC Capital vet and cofounder, have left the firm. It is a fund connected to BlueCrest Capital, which is asking for its money back.
On Friday, Bloomberg's Max Abelson reported that the hedge fund of famed financial-crisis-era bank analyst Meredith Whitney was in trouble.
But things may be much worse than initially thought.
In a new report Sunday evening, Abelson reported that Whitney's fund was down 11% through last month and that her office was on the market.
Whitney's American Revival Fund LP dropped during eight out of the past 11 months. And in two months in which the fund was up, it was by less than 1%, Abelson reports.
This is during a year that has so far seen the S&P 500 rally 12%.
Whitney made a name for herself during the financial crisis when she correctly predicted that Citigroup would be forced to cut its dividend.
She also predicted hundreds of billions of dollars of municipal bond defaults in 2010 — but that never happened.
On Friday, Abelson reported that Whitney's hedge fund lost 4.5%, following targeted returns of 12% to 17%.
The hedge fund's CEO Brittani Caetano and SAC Capital veteran and cofounder Stephen Schwartz have left the firm. And, to make things worse, a fund connected to BlueCrest Capital is asking for its money back.
The problems just keep piling up for the famed financial-crisis-era bank analyst Meredith Whitney and her hedge fund.
In a story published late Tuesday, Bloomberg's Max Abelson reported that a hedge fund connected to Michael Platt's BlueCrest Capital Management is suing Whitney's American Revival Fund.
Reportedly, Platt's BlueCrest Capital Opportunities brought the lawsuit seeking to get back its $46 million stake in Whitney's fund. Abelson reported last Friday that the fund was asking for its money back.
And here's the real kicker — the suit was brought in Bermuda, which Whitney's attorney said was "contrary explicitly to a contractual agreement that any lawsuits or legal disputes would be resolved here in New York," writes Abelson.
“The suit shows how quickly relations have soured since last year, when Platt helped Witney […] start her firm,” writes Abelson.
This legal dispute is the latest development in the string of problems that Whitney and her fund have seen.
Additionally, her fund is reportedly down 11% through last month and her Madison Avenue office is on the market.
And on top of all that, the hedge fund's CEO Brittani Caetano and SAC Capital veteran and cofounder Stephen Schwartz have left the firm.
T. Boone Pickens certainly has a way with words and a knack for telling it like it is.
In fact, the 86 year-old energy tycoon/author of "The First Billion Is The Hardest" has a ton of catchy/easy to remember phrases about life and business.
They're affectionately referred to by his family and staff members as "Boone-isms."
We've compiled some of his business Boone-isms in the slides that follow from his website boonepickens.com.
These and other verbal gems are often posted through his Twitter account @BoonePickens.
"A plan without action is not a plan. It's a speech."
Hedge fund manager Thomas S. Gilbert Sr., the 70-year-old founder of Wainscott Capital Partners, was fatally shot allegedly by his 30-year-old son, according to the NYPD.
The police say Gilbert was found dead with a gun wound to the head at his Upper East Side apartment at 20 Beekman Place around 3:30 p.m. on Sunday.
Gilbert's son was the only other person in the apartment, a police spokesperson told Business Insider. The son fled the scene on foot and NYPD detectives are currently looking to speak with him, the spokesperson said.
Shelley Gilbert, the wife of Thomas Gilbert Sr., made the 911 call.
A handgun was found inside the apartment.
Gilbert, who had 40 years experience on Wall Street, founded Wainscott Capital Partners in 2011. Wainscott is a long/short equity hedge fund that manages around $200 million in assets, according to the firm's website.
The value of the ruble isn't the only thing that is vanishing in Russia. A Moscow hedge fund chief executive has disappeared, along with all the money in the firm's accounts.
That's according to a stunning feature in The Wall Street Journal. Kim Karapetyan, 29, the youthful founder of Blackfield Capital CJSC, has disappeared, much to the dismay of his staff, which didn't know until a group of men charged into the firm's plush offices.
From The Journal:
The firm’s employees didn’t know anything was amiss until mid-October, when three men charged into Blackfield’s offices in an upscale complex along the Moscow River in central Moscow, said people who were there.
The men, who didn't identify themselves, said they were looking for Blackfield's 29-year-old founder, Kim Karapetyan, according to the people who were there.
But Mr. Karapetyan wasn't in the office that day or the next, when senior executives explained to the staff of about 50 that there was no longer any money to pay their salaries, said one former senior executive and ex-employees. The executives disclosed that all the money in the company accounts — some $20 million, including investor cash — was also missing, they said. It couldn't be determined whether investors were from Russia or other countries.
"Our CEO just … disappeared," said Sergey Grebenkin, one of the firm's software developers, in an interview.
No attempts to contact or find Karapetyan were successful, and he is still MIA. The company's website brags that its "systematic investment process helps avoid human-factor, cognitive-biases, and emotional-trading errors," but the CEO running away with all your money seems like a fairly big human error.
Karapetyan is a bit of a playboy: He flew the early-2000s boyband Blue into Russia for a company New Year's Eve performance in 2013 and paid $15,000 (£9,800) per month for a flat in New York's financial district, setting a record for rent per square foot in the area. He also instructed US employees of the fund to buy an Aston Martin Vanquish.
Since Karapetyan went missing, The Wall Street Journal found some incredible inconsistencies in his career history, too. He said he had worked at Morgan Stanley as a portfolio manager and graduated with a master's degree from the London School of Economics. Neither institution has any record of him.
Apparently until recently Blackfield had rented out 18 offices on the 46th floor of 7 World Trade Center in New York, with a view to expansions in the US. The firm also planned a London expansion, but unless he's hiding in a Kensington basement, it seems likely that the fund will be making that move anytime soon.
Legendary macro trader Paul Tudor Jones, the founder of Tudor Investment Corp., is closing his futures fund—the first fund he ever opened—to focus on his flagship fund, CNBC's Kate Kelly reports.
The Tudor Futures Fund managed $300 million, according to CNBC. The futures fund, which was opened in 1984, also never had a down year.
"I'll continue to manage the firm's flagship fund. I am and will continue to be the largest risk taker for that fund as far as I can see into the future," Jones wrote in a recent investor letter, according to Kelly.
Meanwhile, the flagship fund–the $11 billion Tudor Global BVI—was up about 3.5% through the end of December, according to CNBC's Kelly.
Thomas S. Gilbert Jr., a well-educated, 30-year-old socialite, has been arrested and charged with the fatal shooting of his hedge fund father, Thomas S. Gilbert Sr., a New York Police Dept. representative said.
Thomas Gilbert Jr. has been charged with murder in the second degree and criminal possession of a weapon.
He had been in police custody since early Monday morning.
On Sunday, the elder Gilbert was found dead with a gun wound to the head at his apartment at 20 Beekman Place in Manhattan's Upper East Side about 3:30 p.m., according to police. A handgun was recovered at the apartment.
Police told Business Insider there was allegedly an "argument over money." ABC News is reporting that investigators said that the father had discussed no longer paying his son's rent and reducing his weekly allowance.
The young Gilbert allegedly went to his parents' apartment on Sunday afternoon. According to police, Gilbert asked his mother, Shelley, to go out and get him a sandwich. When she returned, she found her husband dead and called 911.
The younger Gilbert was the only other person in the apartment at the time, an NYPD representative told Business Insider. He allegedly fled the scene on foot, and detectives were looking to speak with him. He was taken into custody on Monday after being confronted at his Chelsea apartment.
The elder Gilbert was the founder of long-short equity hedge fund Wainscott Capital Partners. Gilbert, who had more than 40 years of experience on Wall Street, opened the fund in 2011.
Thomas Gilbert Jr. went to elite private schools — The Buckley School and Deerfield Academy. He later attended Princeton University.
Steve Cohen's new family office, Point72 Asset Management, had a good year.
Matthew Goldstein at Dealbook reports that the firm, which now manages only Cohen's family money, made a gross profit of $2.5-3 billion in 2014 after launching in April with about $10 billion.
The $2.5-3 billion figure doesn't take into account operating costs, but it's pretty good for a guy who just got out from under the thumb of federal prosecutors eight months ago — particularly since hedge funds averaged a return under 4% last year.
A former girlfriend of the man who has been accused of killing his hedge-fund-manager father told the New York Post that he often complained about his father being "hypercritical" of him.
Anna Rothschild, a divorcee who is in her mid-40s, said that 30-year-old socialite Thomas S. Gilbert Jr. said he "couldn't do anything right" in the eyes of his father, hedge fund manager Thomas S. Gilbert Sr.
"He talked a lot about his dad and how mean he was to him and how nothing was good enough," Rothschild told the Post.
Gilbert has been charged with second-degree murder and criminal possession of a weapon in connection to the death of his 70-year-old father. The elder Gilbert was found dead with a gun wound to his head at his apartment in Manhattan's Upper East Side on Sunday.
Police said there was some sort of argument about money between the father and son, and ABC News has reported that the father was considering no longer paying his son's rent and reducing his weekly allowance.
According to the Post, Gilbert's father was going to cut his allowance by $200. Gilbert Sr. had been subsidizing his son's lifestyle by paying for his son's $2,400-a-month Chelsea apartment and giving him a weekly allowance of $600, the Post's report said.
Rothschild, who said she dated Gilbert for a few months last year, called him a "loner" and said he wanted to start his own hedge fund but that his father would not help him.
In May, Gilbert — a graduate of The Buckley School, Deerfield Academy, and Princeton University — filed aform D with the Securities and Exchange Commissionfor his own hedge fund, Mameluke Capital Fund LP. It's unclear how many assets under management he had.
The elder Gilbert was the founder of the long-short equity hedge fund Wainscott Capital Partners. Gilbert, who had more than 40 years of experience on Wall Street, opened the fund in 2011. He was described to Business Insider by a friend as a "very nice man."
Herbalife — a multilevel marketing firm that sells nutrition products like weight-loss shakes and vitamins— has been at the center of a hedge fund war for over two years.
Activist investor Bill Ackman, the CEO of Pershing Square Capital, publicly announced in December 2012 that he was shorting the company to $0.
Ackman's thesis is that the company operates as a "pyramid scheme" that targets poor people. He believes regulators, specifically the Federal Trade Commission, will shut the company down. (The FTC opened an investigation in March 2014).
After Ackman made his short public, numerous hedge fund managers, most notably Carl Icahn, piled on by going long the stock. In the months following Ackman's initial presentation, share of Herbalife skyrocketed and Ackman rocked up millions in paper losses.
Ackman is now back in the money on his position as the stock has declined in recent months.
And those who were long are feeling the pain.
Stiritz, 79, has racked up hundreds of millions in paper losses, according to our calculations.
On Sept. 3, 2013, Stiritz disclosed a huge long Herbalife position. At the time, Stiritz owned 5,382,362 shares, or a 5.22% stake. We estimated then that Stiritz's Herbalife stake was worth about $322 million. The stock closed at $59.90 the day he disclosed that position.
On Nov. 18, 2013, (when Herbalife was at $67.20) and again on Jan. 29, 2014, (when Herbalife was at $62.82), Stiritz added to his position. He most recently held 7,484,804 shares, or an 8.15% stake, data compiled by Bloomberg shows.
Since Stiritz first reported the position, shares of Herbalife have slumped more than 46%. The stock was trading down 2.5% on Tuesday morning at $32.12 per share.
Using the closing price of the days on which Stiritz disclosed his stakes, we calculate that he has lost an estimated $218.8 million on his Herbalife investment so far.
The second-largest shareholder is Herbalife's CEO Michael Johnson, and he owns just over 1.38 million shares.
We don't know Stiritz's personal net worth. He's not mentioned on the billionaire lists from either Forbes or Bloomberg.
Stiritz is Post Holdings' largest individual shareholder, with approximately 369,662 shares, Bloomberg data shows. His Post stake is worth just over $15.1 million based on Monday's closing price.
Billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman appears to have a new short, according to a December performance report for Pershing Square Holdings posted on ValueWalk.
According to ValueWalk, the short bet appears to be on a company with a market cap over $5 billion.
Ackman, who runs Pershing Square Capital Management, had a monster year in 2014, netting 40.4% for the year, according to the performance report.
Ackman is known for typically being a long-only activist investor, taking large positions in a handful of companies and advocating for change.
However, Ackman's most famous position might be his short bet against Herbalife — a multilevel marketing company that sells weight loss shakes that he believes operates a "pyramid scheme" and will go to $0.
Ackman was widely criticized for being so public about his short position, with legendary hedge fund manager Leon Cooperman of Omega Advisors calling Ackman "foolish" for doing so.
After amassing millions in paper losses over the last two years on his Herbalife short, he's finally back in the money on that position as the company's stock has continued to decline.
Ackman last spoke about Herbalife in December on Bloomberg TV and sounded incredibly confident in his thesis, even revealing a damning internal video of one of the company's top distributors.
Right now, it's unclear if he'll disclose the short at all.
He's scheduled to be on CNBC's "Squawk Box" tomorrow at 7 am ET, and is also set to speak at the Harbor Investment Conference on February 12.
Here's the December report:
Here's the October report (note that only one short is mentioned):
Paul Sohn, the young portfolio manager who worked on Soros Fund Management's Herbalife investment, left the family-office hedge fund late last year, CNBC's Lawrence Delevingne and Kate Kelly report.
"Paul Sohn's departure is unrelated to any position the firm may have or has had in Herbalife," a spokesperson told CNBC.
Sohn had not responded to our request for comment.
At one point, Herbalife was one of the Soros' big positions. Soros first snapped up more than 5 million shares of Herbalife in the second quarter of 2013.
Soros Fund Management last held 1,888,288 shares of Herbalife, or a 2.06% stake, according to 13F data for the third quarter ended Sept. 30 2014 compiled by Bloomberg. During that quarter, Soros dumped more than 2.8 million shares of its position. (Q4 13F data will come out in mid-February.)
According to a New York Post report from 2013, Sohn told other fund managers at an idea dinner that "George Soros broke the Bank of England" and that "George Soros can break the back of Ackman."
Soon after, Bill Ackman, who runs Pershing Square Capital, filed a complaint the Securities and Exchange Commission alleging that Soros' fund had broken insider trading laws, the Post reported.
Ackman has been crusading against Herbalife for over two years. Ackman first disclosed his short position in December 2012. He believes the company is a "pyramid scheme" that targets lower-income people.
In the months that followed his initial presentation, the trade did not play out well for Ackman. A number of hedge fund managers, most notably his rival Carl Icahn, piled on by going long the stock, and Ackman suffered millions in paper losses.
The tables have turned in recent months with shares of Herbalife declining. Ackman, who was the top performing fund manager in 2014, is back in the money on his Herbalife short.
Bill Ackman channeled his inner Lloyd Blankfein on CNBC Wednesday morning, saying that he's doing "God's work" on Herbalife.
For over two years, Ackman has been publicly crusading against Herbalife, a multilevel marketer that sell weight-loss products, saying that the company's stock is worthless.
The phrase "God's work" was made famous by Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein in a 2009 interview. The comment, which was meant as a joke, was not taken as such and has since become infamous in finance.
In December 2012, Ackman gave a 342-slide presentation declaring that he was short $1 billion worth of Herbalife shares. Ackman believes that the company operates as a "pyramid scheme" that targets poor people, especially those from the Hispanic population.
His investment thesis is predicated on regulators, specifically the Federal Trade Commission, shutting the company down. (The FTC opened an investigation into the company in March 2014.)
In the months that followed his initial presentation, Herbalife shares skyrocketed as a number of fund managers piled on by going long against Ackman's position. Herbalife's stock traded as high as $83.51 last year but has recently declined, and shares closed at $30.42 on Tuesday.
Ackman told CNBC on Wednesday that he thinks the stock will continue to fall.
"A few more days and we are done," Ackman said after pointing to the stock's decline so far this week.
Ackman told CNBC that he thinks Herbalife is "going to miss earnings massively," and added that the company is going to have to redo its guidance for next year. Ackman also believes there's a big seller right now.
Allergan Deal
In 2014, Ackman's Pershing Square fund had an impressive 40% return, while most other funds struggled to beat the Standard and Poor's 500. One of Ackman's big winners last year was Allergan.
For a large part of 2014, Pershing Square and Canadian pharmaceutical company Valeant had been pushing to buy Allergan, the maker of Botox. Allergan had repeatedly rejected Valeant's offers.
Then, Irish pharmaceutical company Actavis came in as a white knight and agreed to buy Allergan for a much higher price than Valeant was going to pay.
Ackman, who owned about 10% of Allergan shares, made over $2.2 billion on the Actavis/Allergan deal.
"I'm not disappointed," he said on "Squawk Box," adding that he thought the transaction was "great for shareholders."
Ackman also told CNBC that he had talked for years about partnering with someone to buy a business. "I think we'll do it again," he said, clarifying that it's a "hypothetical" and he doesn't have a target right now.
Texan hedge fund manager Kyle Bass is going activist against the US pharmaceutical industry and its patents, according to a conference attendee on Twitter.
"We'll have a separate pharmacy vehicle. We've dedicated half of our resources over the past six months to this," Bass told conference attendees.
According to the conference attendee, Bass called it a "short activist strategy."
Bass told conference attendees that "pay for delay" is coming to an end for drugmakers. He also said he planned to file IPR petitions (inter partes reviews) to challenge drugmaker patents.
"This will change the way pharma companies [manage] their BS patents," Bass said.
He continued: "The beautiful thing is this will lower drug prices for everyone."
We reached out to Hayman Capital for more on the presentation.
On Wednesday, Herbalife put out a statement that said Bill Ackman and his team canceled a meeting with the company in December at the last minute.
In a statement posted on Twitter, Herbalife said: "Ackman is entirely predictable, with Herbalife put options expiring next week, he is off on another tirade of misrepresentations, the sole purpose of which is to drive down our share price. The facts about our business are inconvenient for Mr. Ackman, and he clearly has no interest in learning them, as evidenced by his team's last-minute cancellation of a meeting last month that he requested."
Ackman, the CEO of the $18 billion hedge fund Pershing Square Capital, said in a new statement released Thursday that it wasn't true.
"Rather than speaking to its deteriorating business fundamentals, Herbalife appears to be attempting to distract investors from the facts by claiming — falsely — that we canceled a meeting," Ackman said.
According to Pershing Square, the initial meeting between its legal counsel David Klafter and Herbalife was scheduled for Dec. 17.
Pershing Capital says it "postponed" the meeting — it didn't "cancel" it.
"I’m sorry about having to postpone our meeting. We’re not passing up the chance to meet you," Klafter wrote in an email to Herbalife.
Ackman has been publicly crusading against Herbalife for two years. He first revealed his short in December 2012 by giving a massive 342-slide presentation. He's betting the company's stock goes to $0.
Ackman's thesis is that the company operates as a "pyramid scheme" that targets poor people, particularly from the Hispanic population. He believes regulators, specifically the Federal Trade Commission, will shut the company down. (The FTC opened an investigation in March 2014).
After Ackman made his short public, numerous hedge fund managers, most notably Carl Icahn, piled on by going long the stock. In the months following Ackman's initial presentation, share of Herbalife surged, and Ackman amassed millions in paper losses.
Ackman is now back in the money on his position as the stock has declined in recent months.
Shares of Herbalife were most recently trading around $31.72.
Here's the Pershing Square release:
New York, NY (January 8, 2015) – Responding to Herbalife’s statement issued after the close on Tuesday, January 7, 2015, Bill Ackman stated: “Rather than speaking to its deteriorating business fundamentals, Herbalife appears to be attempting to distract investors from the facts by claiming – falsely – that we cancelled a meeting.”
To set the record straight, Pershing Square Capital Management is releasing all correspondence between Pamela Jones Harbour, Herbalife’s Chief of Global Member Compliance and Policy, and David Klafter, Senior Counsel at Pershing Square. On November 6th, Mr. Klafter sent a 19-page letterto Ms. Harbour outlining serious compliance issues at Herbalife and proposing an in-person meeting to discuss these issues. Ms. Harbour responded by letterinviting Mr. Klafter to Herbalife’s LA headquarters.
Mr. Klafter and Ms. Harbour had subsequent conversations and email correspondence that resulted in a meeting being scheduled among Ms. Harbour, Mr. Klafter and others at Herbalife’s headquarters on December 17th. On December 10th, Mr. Klafter emailed Ms. Harbour to explain that he would have to postpone the meeting because of other pressing year-end priorities (which included the release of a recently obtained Herbalife video). Mr. Klafter wrote: “I’m sorry about having to postpone our meeting. We’re not passing up the chance to meet you.” Mr. Klafter remains interested in meeting with Ms. Harbour as soon as possible.
On December 17th, the originally scheduled date of the meeting with Ms. Harbour, Pershing Square released a video of a meeting of senior distributors and corporate Herbalife executives including: current Senior Vice Presidents Rob Levy and Bruce Peters, Vice President Mike McKee, and Leslie Stanford, a Chairman’s Club member and former member of Herbalife’s board of directors. At the meeting, Chairman’s Club member Stephan Gratziani explains the fraud and deception in Herbalife’s business model. We encourage interested parties to watch the eight-minute summary video and the three-hour complete recording.
Herbalife’s stock price declined 12% on Monday and 8% yesterday on no news. Herbalife did not comment as to the reasons behind the stock price decline. Today, after Mr. Ackman appeared in a CNBC segment, Herbalife’s stock price rose 4%. In its statement today, Herbalife stated: “[W]ith [Mr. Ackman’s] Herbalife put options expiring next week, he is off on yet another tirade of misrepresentations, the sole purpose of which is drive down our share price.”
Mr. Ackman stated: “Yesterday, on CNBC, I said that Herbalife will miss earnings for the fourth quarter of 2014 and will lower its earnings guidance for 2015. If these assertions are incorrect, as Herbalife states, then the company should correct the record by reaffirming both Q4 and 2015 earnings guidance.”
To set the record straight, 97% of the Herbalife put options owned by Pershing Square have been extended and have expiration dates up until 2016. The January put options held by Pershing Square have a strike price of $65 share. Pershing Square may choose to extend, sell or exercise the January put options depending upon market conditions and other factors.
For Argentina and its hedge-fund creditors, 2015 could've meant a new era of cooperation and negotiation, and maybe even an end to their battle over more than $1.3 billion in defaulted debt.
But after some hopeful headlines and tons of conjectures, it didn't take long for things to start looking ugly again.
Does this sound like a country that's ready to sit down at the table and negotiate with "vulture" creditors?
"The world recognizes Argentina's right to defend its finances, its people, its dignity and its sovereignty from the vultures' attacks," Argentine Minister of the Economy Axel Kicillof wrote in a long Twitter rant Wednesday night.
He said that paying the "vultures," a group of hedge funds led by Paul Singer's NML Capital, would be the biggest mistake in Argentina's financial history, and that the people who want to pay said "vultures" are the same people who want to see Argentina permanently indebted.
Given Argentina's history of tragic boom-and-bust debt cycles that have led to economic ruin, that's no small accusation to make.
"Argentina wants to pay 100% of creditors but under conditions that are just, legal, equitable and sustainable,"he finished.
At this point, however, it's hard to say exactly what that means.
Months ago, the country argued that it could not pay its holdout creditors — creditors who have refused to take a massive haircut on defaulted debt dating back to 2001 — because of a legal clause called the RUFO clause.
RUFO, Argentina argued last year, would force the country to pay out billions more to its creditors than it had to — even to those who have restructured their debt and agreed to take a haircut.
The thing is, RUFO expired on Dec. 31. But based on what Kicillof, President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, and other Argentine political and business leaders have said, negotiations aren't coming any time soon. At least not until a new regime is installed in 2016.
If this is what winning looks like, though, victory can't possibly taste as sweet as they say. In the last year the Argentine stock market has been on a whipsaw, falling over 18% in the last three months.
Of course, the stock market is not the economy. But that isn't doing so hot either. Argentina's inflation rate hovers around 40% and GDP contracted 0.8% in December from the same time last year (analysts expected a 0.6% contraction). Exports also fell 12% through December, according to data gathered by Argentina's statistical researcher Indec.
The country depends on commodities exports to fill its anemic coffers with dollars (the central bank's dollar reserves hit a seven-year low in October), but big consumers like China are slowing down their consumption.
So prices are low, and getting farmers to stop hoarding their goods to increase prices took some convincing from President Fernandez de Kirchner. In the last two days of 2014, Argentine farmers sold $300 million worth of grains and other agricultural commodities, Bloomberg reported.
Still, the possibility of a painful trade imbalance looms large. Goods have already become scarce. Most recently, tampons have disappeared from the shelves of Argentine stores. Cabinet chief Jorge Capitanitch blamed the shortage on "strategies" by importers.
The World Bank estimates that when all is said and done, Argentina's economy will have contracted 1.7% in 2014 and will contract 1.5% in 2015. That doesn't seem to faze Fernandez and her cabinet. They know that paying the holdouts would restore the international community's faith in Argentina's commitment to rule of law and bring investors back to the country.
But that can all wait until next year, we suppose.
Tommy Gilbert, the 30-year-old New York City socialite accused of killing his hedge-fund-manager father, has been indicted, NBC New York reports.
Alex Spiro, Gilbert's attorney, said that the circumstances were "tragic" but would not comment further at the hearing.
Earlier this month, Gilbert was charged with second-degree murder and criminal possession of a weapon in connection to the death of his 70-year-old father, also named Thomas.
The father died of a gunshot wound to the head in his Upper East Side apartment shortly after his son had come to visit on Sunday, Jan. 4.
According to reports, the younger Gilbert, a graduate of Princeton University, was upset that his father was cutting his allowance. Gilbert's ex-girlfriend told the New York Post that he and his father had always had a tumultuous relationship.
"He talked a lot about his dad and how mean he was to him and how nothing was good enough," Rothschild told the Post.
Thomas Gilbert, Sr. was the founder of the long-short equity hedge fund Wainscott Capital Partners.
The famed financial-crisis-era bank analyst Meredith Whitney made a big bet on the US heartland — and it didn't work.
Back in June 2013, Whitney predicted that the US heartland was the next major source of growth. Her American Revival Fund proceeded to invest in heartland stocks in November 2013, reports Bloomberg's Max Abelson.
However, "even as parts of the region did well, she made wrong-way bets on companies including a retailer that sells mattresses and stereos on credit in Texas," he reports.
Whitney's fund presentation listed 16 heartland states and predicted the region's growth over the next decade would be twice that of the national average. However, over the firm's first 14 months in operation this was not the case.
Additionally, Abelson reports that Whitney ran her firm "without deputies dedicated to analyze the stocks she thought would rise and fall" and that she apparently told colleagues that "investors bought in for her ideas and wanted her doing research."
Whitney made a name for herself during the financial crisis when she correctly predicted that Citigroup would be forced to cut its dividend.
She also predicted hundreds of billions of dollars of municipal-bond defaults in 2010 — but that never happened.
In late December, it was reported that a hedge fund connected to Michael Platt's BlueCrest Capital Management was suing Whitney's American Revival Fund. Back in October, the fund was asking for its money back.
Furthermore, her firm was down 11% through December, her Madison Avenue office is reportedly on the market, and the hedge fund's CEO Brittani Caetano and SAC Capital veteran and cofounder Stephen Schwartz have left the firm.
Hedge fund manager John Paulson's Advantage Plus fund tanked 36% in 2014, Bloomberg News reports, citing unnamed sources familiar with the fund's performance.
The event-driven fund, which focuses on takeovers, spinoffs, or bankruptcies, fell 3.1% in December, the report said.
Meanwhile, Paulson's Advantage fund fell 29% in 2014 and was down 2.4% in December, the report said.
Paulson, who manages about $19 billion in assets, became famous for his 2007 bet against subprime mortgages.
His returns haven't been so hot lately, though.
This year marked Paulson's second-worst performance ever. His worst year was 2011, when he lost about 52%.
The younger Gilbert was the only other person in the apartment at the time, an NYPD representative told Business Insider. He allegedly fled the scene on foot, and detectives were looking to speak with him. He was taken into custody on Monday after being confronted at his Chelsea apartment.
On Wednesday, 
For Argentina and its hedge-fund creditors, 2015 could've meant a new era of cooperation and negotiation, and maybe even an end to their battle over more than $1.3 billion in defaulted debt. 
The famed financial-crisis-era bank analyst Meredith Whitney made a big bet on the US heartland — and it didn't work.
Hedge fund manager John Paulson's Advantage Plus fund tanked 36% in 2014,