Yeti Data, a big data analytics firm, is suing Snowflake in the U.S. and Germany, alleging that the company infringed on its trademark of the name Snowflake. Snowflake, backed by Salesforce and Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, went public last week. On the first day of trading, Snowflake’s share price more than doubled to become the largest initial public offering for a software company. 

“Snowflake was our verb. It’s the actual process of how we organize data, meaning the data crystallizes around a sticky object like a snowflake does. This is how we do things,” said Yeti founder Victor Szczerba, who is a former manager of the data division at SAP and McKinsey consultant, in an interview. 

“Their [Yeti’s] branding is arguably as genius as their technical solution: big data is akin to a blinding snowstorm, but customers want to visualize and understand individual snowflakes. Since no one understands snow better than the yeti,...

The cloud storage market could triple in value to over $100 billion annually by 2024Crypto trading platform Skew is among the first customers to use CME Group’s new cloud data platform

Multifamily office CAZ Investments and a unit of Aberdeen Standard Investments have begun working together to buy stakes in private capital managers in the middle market.  

CAZ expects to invest more than $250 million under a newly created long-term partnership with Bonaccord Capital Partners, the unit of Aberdeen that acquires minority equity stakes in private market managers, CAZ founder and chief investment officer Christopher Zook said Monday in a phone interview. He said they are considering alternative investment managers with strategies in private equity, private debt, and real estate, targeting firms with $1 billion to $10 billion of assets.

The move is a “critical step” in developing Aberdeen’s private markets business, according to Peter McKellar, the asset manger’s global head of private markets. “Sophisticated private markets investors like CAZ continue to develop away from passive LP investments and into pursuing...

It’s a brilliant, blue-sky afternoon in mid-August, and Bill Ackman is enjoying being, well, Bill Ackman. 

Maybe it’s the sun. Or maybe it’s the aftermath of his latest tour de force — the IPO of a $4 billion special-purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, the largest of its kind during a year when such blank-check deals are exploding. 

Sporting a baseball cap, aviator shades, and a faded polo shirt, the 54-year-old hedge fund mogul eases into the poolside lounge chair at his Hamptons home — where, ever since the Covid crisis hit, he has been living and working — and settles into a Zoom interview, adjusting the computer for the best angle of his incognito look. 

But if you’re expecting Ackman to be relaxed, he’s not. Instead, he quickly rattles off how well his first SPAC has performed. Over eight years, his Pershing Square Capital Management hedge fund’s investment in Burger King — which merged in 2012 with a SPAC...

Paying fees tied to performance could have “unintended consequences” for investors in certain types of strategies, according to researchers from Dimensional Fund Advisors and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Such performance fees are often pitched as a solution to the mismatched goals of asset managers and their asset owner clients: They incentivize higher returns and help ensure that allocators pay fewer fees — or even none at all — when their investments underperform.

Historically, these fee structures have been used in alternative investments like hedge funds and private equity. But recent years have seen a push to adopt performance fees for other investments, including more traditional long-only strategies, observed Dimensional researchers Wei Dai and Savina Rizova and MIT finance professor Robert Merton, in a paper they co-authored this month. 

“As asset owners contemplate implementing performance-based fee...

Bank of America economists don’t buy that higher inflation is coming.

“We push back against the latest arguments for higher inflation in the developed markets world,” Bank of America’s global economists said in a research note Friday. “Despite the rise in inflation breakevens and inflation expectations in consumer surveys,” they said that “real people on the ground are expecting low wages and low pricing power.”

And while home prices may be rising, the economists see “a weak link” with rent inflation partly because of the sharp drop in mortgage rates in almost all developed economies. Additionally, the Covid-19 crisis has disproportionately hurt lower-paid service workers who tend to be renters while prompting many people to leave cities for markets with greater home ownership, according to the note. 

Home prices and rents “are likely to move in [an] opposite direction today, particularly in the U.S.,” the economists wrote. That...

The receptionist for Michael Bloomberg’s family office Willett Advisors won’t confirm that calls have, in fact, reached Willett Advisors. The co-head of Granger Management — a multi-family investment shop in New York — prefers to simply hang up. 

And why not? These operations manage money for the world’s wealthiest, who often buy their mansions under LLCs, avoid any and all press coverage, and keep their financial matters private. 

But as family offices become more serious as investors, trying to stay hidden can conflict with their ability to meet the best and brightest start-ups, founders, and dealmakers, according to industry professionals.

[II Deep Dive: Family Offices Are Torn: Secrecy or Deals?]

“The trick for emerging managers is, how do you find us when we don’t want to be found?” said Erik Landsness, CEO of TAMCAP, which serves a single unnamed family, and does not have a website. He spoke this week alongside...

Insurance companies are looking to private equity for help amid a return to near-zero percent interest rates, according to Cerulli Associates.

“Many insurers are looking to partner with PE firms,” the research firm said in a statement Thursday. According to Cerulli, insurance companies are being “battered” by historically-low interest rates and are in need of higher-yielding investments like private equity to match their underwritten liabilities.

“The low interest environment leaves very little room for poor underwriting or asset management performance — it’s a rising threat to insurers’ business models,” associate director Robert Nelson said in the statement. 

U.S. interest rates were cut to historic lows in mid-March as the spread of coronavirus began to threaten the economy. The Federal Reserve said Wednesday that bank officials expect to leave the Fed’s interest rate near zero through at least 2023.

Insurers surveyed...

After allegedly incurring over $2 billion in losses, yet another retirement system has sued investment and insurance giant Allianz for allegedly mismanaging and misrepresenting volatility investments.  

The Blue Cross Blue Shield Association National Employee Benefits Committee filed a lawsuit Wednesday against both Allianz and its consultant Aon for allegedly downplaying the risks involved with investing in Allianz’s Structured Alpha products.  

In February and March, volatility spiked, and the markets fell precipitously. So too did Allianz’s Structured Alpha products, some of which lost significant value before liquidating, according to the lawsuit.  

“While the losses sustained by the Structured Alpha portfolio during the market downturn in late February and March were disappointing, AllianzGI believes the allegations made by Blue Cross Blue Shield are legally and factually flawed,” a spokesperson for...

Robert Mish is not an oil trader. He’s a numismatist, an expert in rare coins, precious metals, and currencies. Growing up in Brooklyn, he began by collecting stamps and playing cards at the age of four. From there, he moved on to coins and, eventually, valuable antiquities, heading out to California to start his own business in Menlo Park, Mish International Monetary. He traveled the world attending coin shows and became an authority on commodities such as gold, silver, platinum, and palladium, writing and contributing to a number of books. 

This year, two months after his 73rd birthday, Mish found himself trading U.S. crude oil futures at perhaps their most inopportune moment: On April 20, the price of oil fell to zero — and kept falling. Mish, an expert in commodities, was holding ten oil contracts as the market went over the edge.

After 50 years of inspecting currencies and stores of value from the Americas to Europe to Asia, Mish...

Keeping BlackRock’s culture intact is likely the most difficult challenge for the world’s largest asset manager in the Covid-19 pandemic, according to its founder and chief executive officer Larry Fink. 

“Cultures were not meant to be done in a remote fashion,” Fink said Thursday at the virtual Morningstar Investment Conference. “I really am worried about this whole idea of culture and how long you can keep that culture together.”

BlackRock, which manages about $7 trillion of assets globally, has hired about 400 young people since July, according to Fink. “They’ve never been to the office yet,” he said. “Are they going to have the same experience as the young analysts who joined us five years ago where they were physically there?” 

While Fink sees New York-based BlackRock performing well operationally since the outbreak of Covid-19 sent cities into lockdown, he said he’s unsure how well the firm is keeping its cultural...

On July 31, Daniel Kamensky composed a six-word Bloomberg chat message that ruined his life. 

What drove him to do so — and then pushed him to make the string of decisions, each more reckless than the last, that exponentially compounded his troubles over the next few hours — remains a mystery. But one thing is now clear: Those decisions, made between 3:20 and 8:08 p.m. on a single late-summer day, amounted to four criminal fraud charges and the apparent end of a brilliant Wall Street career.

This was not how Dan Kamensky’s story was supposed to turn out. The son of a corporate lawyer who had founded his own firm outside Chicago, Kamensky graduated with bachelor’s and law degrees from Georgetown. He started his career as a bankruptcy attorney at a white-shoe law firm before becoming a major player on the distressed-debt team at Lehman Brothers. He then jumped to Paulson & Co., once one of the most prominent hedge funds in the...

The paradox of skill is making life even harder for active asset managers — particularly stock pickers, according to Michael Mauboussin of Morgan Stanley’s investment management unit.

“Since the financial crisis in ’08, investors have withdrawn $1.8 trillion from active management and added $2 trillion to passive,” Mauboussin, head of consilient research (i.e., connecting principles from different disciplines) at Morgan Stanley’s active fundamental equity group Counterpoint Global, said September 16 at the Morningstar Investment Conference. The shift has accelerated as most stock pickers fail to consistently beat their benchmarks after fees, he said. Simultaneously, “available alpha” appears to be shrinking due to the paradox of skill: the notion that “luck becomes more important” as skill in a field increases and becomes more uniform.

In his view, active managers are facing stiffer competition as their struggling peers give up the...

New manager Hickory Lane Capital Management has launched a $100 million equity long-short fund with seed money from Investcorp-Tages, a joint venture formed in May, as well as capital from outside investors, including family offices and peer hedge fund managers.

Investcorp and European asset manager Tages earlier this year consolidated their absolute return businesses to form a new venture that includes customized portfolios, a hedge fund seeding business, and multi-manager portfolios in private debt and other alternative investments. Prior to forming the joint venture, the two firms had deployed $2 billion in assets between them and seeded 42 emerging managers, mostly hedge funds.

Hickory Lane founder and chief investment officer Joshua Pearl, who spent nine years investing in stocks as a partner at Brahman Capital, never expected that he’d build his first hedge fund firm in a pandemic. But shortly after leaving Brahman, the spread of...

On July 31, Daniel Kamensky composed a six-word Bloomberg chat message that ruined his life. 

What drove him to do so — and then pushed him to make the string of decisions, each more reckless than the last, that exponentially compounded his troubles over the next few hours — remains a mystery. But one thing is now clear: Those decisions, made between 3:20 and 8:08 p.m. on a single late-summer day, amounted to four criminal fraud charges and the apparent end of a brilliant Wall Street career.

This was not how Dan Kamensky’s story was supposed to turn out. The son of a corporate lawyer who had founded his own firm outside Chicago, Kamensky graduated with bachelor’s and law degrees from Georgetown. He started his career as a bankruptcy attorney at a white-shoe law firm before becoming a major player on the distressed-debt team at Lehman Brothers. He then jumped to Paulson & Co., once one of the most prominent hedge funds in the...

Over the past three days, the CalPERS board and members of its staff convened digitally with the goal of moving forward following the sudden resignation of the retirement system’s chief investment officer last month.   

During the public meetings — the first since CIO Ben Meng resigned in controversy — board members highlighted a need for CalPERS to stabilize itself and to make changes to certain governance structures as it moves forward.

“This year we'll be all about refreshing our strategy around our people,” the retirement system’s interim chief investment officer, Dan Bienvenue, said during Monday’s meeting. “Specifically, how we recruit, develop, and retain our team to position ourselves for success both now and in the future.”  

According to Bienvenue, this includes the creation of a research and strategy group and the board governance and sustainability program.    

“All of...

On July 31, Daniel Kamensky composed a six-word Bloomberg chat message that ruined his life. 

What drove him to do so — and then pushed him to make the string of decisions, each more reckless than the last, that exponentially compounded his troubles over the next few hours — remains a mystery. But one thing is now clear: Those decisions, made between 3:20 and 8:08 p.m. on a single late-summer day, amounted to four criminal fraud charges and the apparent end of a brilliant Wall Street career.

This was not how Dan Kamensky’s story was supposed to turn out. The son of a corporate lawyer who had founded his own firm outside Chicago, Kamensky graduated with bachelor’s and law degrees from Georgetown. He started his career as a bankruptcy attorney at a white-shoe law firm before becoming a major player on the distressed-debt team at Lehman Brothers. He then jumped to Paulson & Co., once one of the most prominent hedge funds in the...

China consumes half of the world’s copper, and the country’s factory activity in August reached its highest level since 2011China’s switch to renewable energy systems is likely to be a key demand driver for copper moving forward

Major U.S. nonprofits love the investment talent at Carnegie Corporation. 

The $11 billion foundation has lost three senior staffers so far this month, all of them hired as chief investment officers by peer institutions. 

Women’s college Bryn Mawr has nabbed Carnegie managing director Brooke Jones as the inaugural CIO of its $888 million endowment, according to the school’s president. Jones follows Carnegie chief Kim Lew, who is departing to take over Columbia University’s massive and high-profile endowment. Another managing director also recently accepted a nonprofit CIO role elsewhere, sources said. 

Carnegie Corporation’s plan for replacing these outgoing investment leaders is not yet clear. 

Jones joins the Pennsylvania liberal arts college in mid-October, Bryn Mawr president Kim Cassidy told stakeholders in a recent letter. 

She is starting an investment office from scratch. “One of Brooke’s...