After Increasing CPF Min Sum, Ho Jinx Took Another USD 500M to Gamble. 60%, Song Bo?

[makapaaa]

Temasek Invests in Dymon Asia to Start Hedge-Fund Platform By Tomoko Yamazaki and Bei Hu May 12, 2014 12:19 PM GMT+0800




<figure class="hide_caption image_focus sml_lede toggle_caption"> <figcaption>Photographer: Munshi Ahmed/Bloomberg </figcaption>Temasek has in recent years made other alternative investments such as those in hedge funds, private equity and real estate through or with local companies. Close

Temasek has in recent years made other alternative investments such as those in hedge... Read More

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Open Photographer: Munshi Ahmed/Bloomberg Temasek has in recent years made other alternative investments such as those in hedge funds, private equity and real estate through or with local companies.





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</section> Temasek Holdings Pte, the Singapore state-owned investment company, will start a venture with Dymon Asia Capital (Singapore) Pte to back new hedge fund managers and strategies as it becomes a minority stakeholder in the firm.

Temasek committed $500 million initially that will be managed by Dymon, a hedge-fund manager based in the island-state, according to Dymon President Jay Luo. Luo and Dymon Managing Director Ben Freischmidt will be leading the new venture for Dymon, according to an e-mailed statement.

The partnership will allow Temasek to diversify its investment and returns through a local company, and enable Dymon, one of Asia’s largest hedge funds, to add to its traditional business of running macro funds by providing non-investment services to help managers start their own pools.

“Temasek is as long-term and stable as it gets, and Dymon is a Singapore success story in the hedge-fund world,” said Will Tan, a managing director at Singapore-based recruitment company Principle Partners Pte, whose clients include hedge funds. “The strategic investment into Dymon bodes well for both parties as Temasek gets to diversify its investments using the Dymon platform and Dymon gets the backing of an established” state investment company.
[h=2]Temasek Confirmed[/h]Temasek spokesman Stephen Forshaw confirmed the partnership in an e-mail. The statement didn’t disclose the size of Temasek’s stake while Luo didn’t elaborate when asked by phone. Dymon, which started trading as a macro hedge fund manager in August 2008 with $113 million of assets and the backing of Paul Tudor Jones’s Tudor Investment Corp., has since expanded assets to more than $4 billion across various alternative strategies.
The partnership comes at a time when investors prefer large, established companies, starving small, new hedge funds of capital. The number of new hedge funds started sank to a three-year low last year and liquidations surged to the highest since 2009, according to Chicago-based Hedge Fund Research Inc.

“We are very excited to establish this relationship with Temasek,” Luo said in the statement. “We share a long-term vision of working with the best managers and believe our proposition to managers and investors is unique.”
[h=2]Carl Vine[/h]The Temasek-Dymon venture’s first investment will be in a global equity long-short hedge fund focused on the Asia-Pacific region and led by Carl Vine, a former SAC Capital Advisors LP manager, according to Luo. Vine, based in Oxford, the U.K., plans to start the Port Meadow Fund with an initial fundraising limit of $500 million in the third quarter.

“Dymon has shown in the last six years that they know the alternative business and have grown into one of Asia’s largest hedge funds,” Tan said.

Dymon’s macro fund in 2011 had a more than 20 percent return, the most in Asia among hedge funds with assets of more than $1 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

In 2012, it hired Luo, a former Asia head of Steven A. Cohen’s SAC, as president and a partner. Freischmidt, the chief operating officer of the new platform business, was a founding member of GLG Partners LP’s Asia long-short equity business, according to the statement.
[h=2]Alternative Investments[/h]Dymon last year raised S$203 million ($162 million) for the first close of a private-equity fund to invest in small- and medium-sized companies in Singapore and Southeast Asia, Keith Tan, Dymon managing partner, said then. Heliconia, a Temasek unit, invested in the fund, Jeffrey Fang, a spokesman at the state investment company, told Bloomberg News at the time.

Temasek has in recent years made other alternative investments such as those in hedge funds, private equity and real estate through or with local companies.

The state investment firm in August 2009 set up a wholly owned company called Seatown Holdings Pte with committed capital of more than S$4 billion to invest in assets including stocks and bonds globally.

In January 2012, it announced the establishment of Pavilion Capital Pte, a wholly owned company run by former Temasek Chief Investment Officer Tow Heng Tan, to invest in privately held businesses in North Asia including China.

Seatown and RRJ Capital Ltd. earlier this year invested $250 million in a Chinese logistics warehouse developer, Shanghai Yupei Group Co., according to an April statement by the Chinese company. RRJ was founded by Charles Ong, once Temasek’s CIO and Seatown chief executive officer, and his brother, Richard Ong, who had been a Goldman Sachs Group Inc. partner.

To contact the reporters on this story: Tomoko Yamazaki in Singapore at [email protected]; Bei Hu in Hong Kong at [email protected]
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Andreea Papuc at [email protected] Iain McDonald

 

[mojito]

Re: After Increasing CPF Min Sum, Ho Jinx Took Another USD 500M to Gamble. 60%, Song

Time to do the laundry.

 

[SgGoneWrong]

Re: After Increasing CPF Min Sum, Ho Jinx Took Another USD 500M to Gamble. 60%, Song

Ho Jinx didn't gamble. She simply did a wealth transfer. From sinkies to Leegime bank accounts.

 

[winnipegjets]

Re: After Increasing CPF Min Sum, Ho Jinx Took Another USD 500M to Gamble. 60%, Song

Dymon President Jay Luo is an Ah Tiong!!!!!!!

Jay was born in the People's Republic of China, and graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Physics from Beijing
University in 1987 and a Ph.D. in Chemistry from Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania in
1996. Jay attained his CFA certification in 2003, PRM (Professional Risk Manager's International Association
(PRMIA) in 1999, and FRM from the Global Association of Risk Professionals (GARP) in 1998. Jay currently serves
on the Products Advisory Committee for Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission.

 

[LEGEND]

Re: After Increasing CPF Min Sum, Ho Jinx Took Another USD 500M to Gamble. 60%, Song

Do you want three meals in a hawker centre, food court or restaurant? Vivian Balakrishnan.

 

[winnipegjets]

Re: After Increasing CPF Min Sum, Ho Jinx Took Another USD 500M to Gamble. 60%, Song

Before we believe that PAP bullshit ...find out more about SAC.

Hedge Fund SAC Capital held its second conference call since a subsidiary hedge fund's manager, Mathew Martoma, was charged in the largest insider trading case in history.
The call was short, less than half an hour, but CNBC's Kate Kelly gave the low down on what happened.

SAC Founder Steve Cohen has not been charged with any wrongdoing.
That said, if SAC is liable for anything monetarily, investors will not have to pay anything out. The hedge fund has set things up so that Cohen will take the financial hit.
Cohen has been meeting individually with portfolio managers to make sure everyone is on the same page.
That's about it, folks.


Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/sac-capitals-2nd-conference-call-2012-11#ixzz31UWjVJd8

 

[winnipegjets]

Re: After Increasing CPF Min Sum, Ho Jinx Took Another USD 500M to Gamble. 60%, Song

U.S. to put SAC hedge fund out of business over insider trading

Steven A. Cohen faces an abrupt end to his career as one of the world's most successful traders after his SAC Capital Advisors became the largest Wall Street firm in years to agree to plead guilty to criminal charges of insider trading, and pay $1.2 billion in fines.

But Cohen, a multi-billionaire and renowned modern art collector, has not been personally charged with any crime and will likely continue managing some $9 billion of his own money through a lightly regulated family office once the hedge fund's plea deal is approved by the courts.

The winding down of the hedge fund's advisory business, which began returning billions of dollars to investors earlier this year as a criminal investigation heated up, requires SAC to install an independent compliance monitor if it continues to trade in the near term, something that will be a big change for Cohen who is known to be a micro-manager.

SAC's guilty plea and fine, announced by prosecutors on Monday, is in addition to a $616 million settlement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said at a press conference that the plea deal sends a message to Wall Street that no "institution is too big to jail." He rejected criticism that the plea is something of a disappointment because Cohen himself was not charged with any criminal wrongdoing.

"What happened today is a very substantial and important thing," said Bharara. "It is a rare thing for an entity to be held to account."

Cohen's fund, which once employed more than 900 people with offices on three continents, will no longer manage money for outside investors including pensions, endowments and wealthy individuals, according to the settlement.

Jonathan Gasthalter, a spokesman for SAC Capital, said the firm is taking "responsibility for the handful of men who pleaded guilty" to insider trading while working at the hedge fund. But he added the firm has "never encouraged, promoted or tolerated insider trading."

April Brooks, special agent in charge of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's New York field office, said the case is a warning to those on Wall Street who aspire to the creed that unfettered "greed is good," as famously espoused by the character Gordon Gekko in the movie "Wall Street."

The guilty plea, which needs to be approved by two judges, coincides with SAC Capital posting solid performance and far outperforming other hedge funds despite the taint of scandal. The fund is up 1.3 percent in October and up 15.95 percent so far this year, a source familiar with its performance said, compared to an almost 6 percent gain for the average fund.

DECISION TIME FOR BANKS ON SAC

Legal observers said it could be days or even weeks before the settlement is approved, giving SAC Capital and prosecutors more time to choose a compliance monitor. It also may give more time to the big Wall Street banks likes Goldman Sachs Group Inc and JPMorgan Chase that lend money to SAC Capital and earn hundreds of millions of dollars a year in trading commissions to decide if they will continue doing business with Cohen firm once it reconstitutes as a family office.

Representatives for Goldman and JPMorgan did not immediately comment on their plans with regards to SAC Capital. But industry sources said the banks are likely to continue to do business with SAC as long as regulators permit.

Indeed, the settlement is only the beginning of a long process for Cohen of freeing himself from the constraints of a federal investigation that has gone on for at least seven years and has tarnished his reputation.

In charging SAC Capital in July with securities fraud and wire fraud, prosecutors accused the 21-year-old Stamford, Conn.-based firm of presiding over a culture in which employees regularly flouted the law and were encouraged to tap personal networks for inside information about publicly traded companies.

"The government is getting an enormous amount of money and shutting down his advisory business. They've basically achieved what they wanted, which is to cut off this guy's ability to manage other people's money," said C. Evan Stewart, a partner at Zuckerman Spaeder who is not connected with the case.

The agreement does not preclude future criminal charges against individuals in the investigation, according to a letter filed in U.S. District Court by prosecutors. Investigations are continuing into trading in at least two other stocks, Weight Watchers International and The Gymboree Corporation, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The person said the investigation could lead to other charges against people who are still employed at SAC. The source, who did not want to be identified, said authorities are still investigating whether Cohen personally can be tied to any allegation of insider trading at the firm.

Cohen is still facing an administrative action brought in July by the SEC accusing him of failing to properly supervise his employees. The indictment against SAC named seven one-time employees of the firm who have either been charged or convicted of insider trading.

LONG-RUNNING INVESTIGATION

The deal also does not include a specific cooperation agreement between the government and SAC, which means it is not clear whether the firm will have to provide more information to the government for the ongoing investigations.

The deal will punctuate one of the longest-running, highest-profile insider trading investigations in recent years, although it will not necessarily end the effort.

The guilty plea from SAC Capital is the biggest achievement yet for U.S. prosecutors in its multi-year crackdown on insider trading in the $2.2 trillion hedge fund industry that has already led to the convictions of former Galleon Group founder Raj Rajaratnam and former Goldman Sachs Group Inc director Rajat Gupta, also a onetime head of McKinsey & Co consultancy.

The hedge fund founded by Cohen in 1992 with $25 million charged some of the highest fees in the industry and was one the more successful, returning an average of 25 percent a year for investors.

U.S. prosecutors charged the hedge fund - which managed as much as $14 billion this year before investors began withdrawing money - on one count of wire fraud and four counts of securities fraud. As part of Monday's deal, SAC has agreed to plead guilty to all five counts.

The total settlement amount of $1.8 billion is made up of $900 million in fines and forfeiture of $900 million. The total forfeiture amount includes a $616 million sum that SAC had already agreed to pay earlier this year to settle civil lawsuits by the SEC.

Meanwhile, observers are expecting an exodus of top employees from SAC, which still maintains a large headquarters in Stamford, Conn. and this year has shuttered offices in London and Chicago.

Several employees leaving SAC Capital's offices in midtown Manhattan declined to comment. Wall Street recruiters have said in recent weeks that traders and analysts at the hedge fund have begun taking preliminary steps towards looking for new jobs.

Cohen will have to "dramatically" downsize his operation, said Stephen Martiros, an independent consultant to family office and private investors.

"Most everything about the way they've been running the firm will have to change," he said, adding SAC could shed marketing specialists, client relationship managers and some legal and compliance staff.

A person who worked with SAC for many years said since the bulk of the firm bonuses will be paid out in the next few weeks, many employees poised to join other hedge funds or start their own funds will likely make their moves.

(Reporting by Emily Flitter, Katya Wachtel and Matthew Goldstein with additional reporting by Svea Herbst-Bayliss, Nate Raymond and Ben Walsh, Editing by Jeffrey Benkoe and Grant McCool)

 

[winnipegjets]

Re: After Increasing CPF Min Sum, Ho Jinx Took Another USD 500M to Gamble. 60%, Song

Why SAC Capital's Steven Cohen Isn't in Jail

$1.2 billion to settle criminal charges that it had engaged in securities fraud. The hearing was the culmination of a long legal struggle between SAC and the government that has dramatically altered what was once one of Wall Street’s most powerful firms. Eight former or current SAC employees have been charged with insider trading. Six of them have pleaded guilty; one, Mathew Martoma, is due to go on trial on Jan. 6, and another, Michael Steinberg, was convicted on Dec. 18 of insider trading in two technology stocks. Separately, Cohen was charged in a civil case with failing to supervise his employees by the Securities and Exchange Commission, which is seeking to bar him from the securities industry. Cohen’s company is transforming itself into a much smaller operation that manages only Cohen’s money. SAC had fostered an unprecedented “culture of corporate corruption,” U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said when the criminal charges against the company were first unveiled.

The man who was conspicuously absent from the courtroom that day was Cohen. After seven years of investigations, wiretaps, unearthed documents, and undercover informants, the government had not been able to assemble enough evidence to charge Cohen criminally with insider trading—though people familiar with the investigation say the pursuit of the billionaire hedge fund founder continues. It’s becoming increasingly apparent, however, that Cohen was just clever—or lucky—enough to avoid the harshest penalties levied against some of his own employees. The reasons why may trace back to his actions during a few pivotal weeks in the summer of 2008.


SAC, at the beginning of 2008, was at its peak, with close to 1,200 employees and more than $16 billion in assets. The firm had just gone through several years of rapid expansion, moving into areas beyond its specialty as a short-term stock-trading shop, having launched a private equity group in 2007, a Hong Kong office the year before, and other new funds and divisions in the preceding years. There were lavish holiday parties, three in-office masseuses, and the occasional cigarette boat stashed outside the firm’s headquarters in Stamford, Conn. The collection of cars in the parking lot was legendary: a portfolio manager’s Mercedes with gullwing doors, Maseratis, Ferraris, a brown Bentley just like Justin Bieber’s. Few at SAC could have imagined what was to come during the next 12 months, when the firm’s “edge” would evaporate and two portfolio managers would commit acts that would have them facing prison five years later. The year 2008 was, and remains, SAC’s only down year, when the firm’s flagship fund lost almost 28 percent.

Both Jon Horvath and Martoma had been with SAC for more than a year. Martoma, now 39, had grown up in Florida, graduated from Duke University, and had an impressive collection of degrees and residencies, including a stretch at Harvard Law School, a Stanford MBA, and time logged at a Boston hedge fund called Sirios Capital Management. Horvath, 44, a Swedish native who’d been raised in Toronto, graduated from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont., with a degree in Commerce. He had shaggy hair and a slightly dazed expression that made him perpetually look as if he’d been up partying the night before. He’d worked at Lehman Brothers in San Francisco analyzing computer stocks at its Neuberger Berman asset management group before joining SAC’s Sigma Capital Management unit in New York in September 2006, following a vetting process that lasted six months.

SAC was structured like a bicycle wheel, with the spokes consisting of about 100 portfolio managers with their own teams of analysts and traders working in competition with the other teams. Camaraderie in SAC’s offices was low. At the center was Cohen, 57, the only connector between the different groups, who would take the best ideas from each and trade on them himself. Aside from losing money, there was nothing Cohen hated more than a portfolio manager who didn’t communicate vigorously and often.

Horvath’s job was to provide research ideas to Michael Steinberg, who had been at SAC since 1996 and was one of its most senior portfolio managers. Steinberg, 41, had attended the same high school as Cohen—Great Neck North in Long Island, N.Y.—and the two were close. Horvath tracked companies including Dell, Apple (AAPL), Microsoft (MSFT), IBM (IBM), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), and many others. He traveled constantly between California—where he had an apartment in San Francisco and a ski share at Lake Tahoe—and New York, as well as to conferences and company visits in places such as Boston, Arizona, and Taiwan.

If Horvath was sure of one thing after his first year at SAC, it was the unforgiving nature of the place. If your ideas didn’t make money, you were out. His investment recommendations to Steinberg had done reasonably well in the first half of 2007, generating $7 million to $10 million dollars in profit to the Steinberg portfolio. But after two Bear Stearns hedge funds collapsed that July and the market started to shudder, Horvath’s stock picks lost most of those gains. One stock in particular, Network Appliance (NTAP), a data-storage company that Horvath had urged his boss to buy, plunged and caused losses of $2 million. Sometime later, after the Sigma offices on Madison Avenue had emptied out, Horvath later testified in court, Steinberg called him over to his desk on the trading floor.

“I can day-trade these stocks and make money by myself, I don’t need your help to do that,” Horvath says Steinberg told him, speaking slowly and deliberately. “What I need you to do is go out and get me edgy, proprietary information that we can use to make money in these stocks.” Steinberg added: “You need to talk to your contacts at the companies, bankers, consultants. And leverage your peer network to get that information.” Horvath says he understood this to mean that he should try to get nonpublic information they could use to make money—or he’d lose his job. During his trial, Steinberg vigorously disputed that this conversation ever happened.

Horvath took home a relative pittance of $416,084 of compensation in 2007, compared with Steinberg’s $5.1 million. He rang in the New Year vowing to do better. He cultivated a relationship with Jesse Tortora, an analyst at a hedge fund called Diamondback Capital, whom he’d met through a former roommate in San Francisco. Tortora was well connected and started funneling him inside information about Dell, which, Horvath later testified, he passed up to Steinberg.

With the financial crisis bearing down on them, it was getting harder and harder to make money. On Jan. 11, 2008, Bank of America (BAC) announced it was buying Countrywide Financial, saving the mortgage lender from bankruptcy. On Jan. 15, Steinberg sent out an e-mail to all of the analysts in his group: “Time to retrench,” read the subject line. “Risk avoidance is the new maxim for us on the long side, until this market settles out,” he wrote. “We will not own 1 share of anything where we don’t have a qualitative, proprietary edge. Please do not propose any ideas without it.”

At the time, Martoma was juggling a different set of challenges as a portfolio manager focused on health-care stocks at CR Intrinsic, an elite research-driven unit that was walled off with glass from the rest of the trading floor in Stamford. Known as a polite, quiet fellow who never ran afoul of SAC’s compliance department, Martoma had been drawn to the firm by a guarantee that he’d take home a large chunk of the profits of his own portfolio and a portion of the proceeds in the Cohen and CR Intrinsic accounts, to the extent that he contributed to them. No other hedge fund offered such a direct gateway to potential riches. Martoma had been married for three years to Rosemary, a physician (they eventually had three children); he had studied biology at Duke and worked after college at the National Human Genome Research Institute. It was only natural he’d be drawn to stocks such as Elan and Wyeth, which, during 2008, were testing a new potential blockbuster Alzheimer’s drug called bapineuzumab that seemed like it might yield a windfall.

Martoma spent the first half of 2008 aggressively pitching Elan and Wyeth to Cohen because he expected the trial results to be good. Not everyone agreed. That spring, dissent festered over the investment, which was becoming a source of gossip within the SAC offices. Two analysts in particular, David Munno and Benjamin Slate, tried to dissuade Cohen from building such risky exposure to two volatile drug companies. “ELN, (important, please read) negative reads from company and other buysiders,” they wrote to their boss in one March 2008 e-mail. In April, at Cohen’s urging, the analysts consulted with another doctor who had some familiarity with the Alzheimer’s drug trial, who also contradicted Martoma’s optimism. But Martoma felt he had the best source. According to the government, he’d been getting nonpublic information from an Alzheimer’s expert at the University of Michigan named Dr. Sidney Gilman, who was overseeing the clinical trial of the new drug. (Martoma pleaded not guilty to charges of insider trading. “Mathew continues to fight these charges and is preparing for trial,” says his lawyer, Richard Strassberg of Goodwin Procter.)

As the traders scrambled to not lose money during the shaky spring of 2008, a government crackdown on illegal trading was beginning to crystallize. After 12 months of digging by the SEC, federal prosecutors at the Southern District of New York, and the FBI’s securities unit, the first wiretaps were placed in the investigation of the Galleon Group hedge fund in March 2008. They would eventually lead to dozens of insider-trading convictions (Raj Rajaratnam, Galleon’s co-founder, is serving an 11-year sentence). Around the same time, a handful of the earliest cooperators in the government’s probe of the industry were approached, in secret, by FBI agents—and all of them flipped and decided to cooperate.

Horvath, meanwhile, continued his exhaustive research of his tech companies, building spreadsheets and chasing investor-relations contacts. He also continued feeding the SAC trading machine with data on Dell he was getting, he says, from Tortora, his contact at Diamondback Capital. In April, Steinberg sent an e-mail to Horvath with the subject line “Code.” In it, Steinberg said that he was going to start referring to one of his contacts, a former SAC analyst named Richard Choo Beng Lee, who was often called “CB” by his friends, as “BC” from then on. The timing was uncanny—the government was just launching its investigation, and months later, in 2009, Lee would be approached by the FBI and persuaded to cooperate, providing evidence of wrongdoing involving SAC and other firms. But the flipping of initials started for internal competitive reasons, to hide information from other portfolio managers at SAC. Horvath started referring to Tortora, the source of his Dell intelligence, as “TJ” rather than “JT,” and another SAC trader began referring to Galleon as “lag” rather than “gal.”


Elan and Wyeth announced initial results for the Alzheimer’s drug trial on June 17. They were positive, emboldening both Martoma and Cohen. By June 30, 2008, CR Intrinsic owned over $233 million worth of Elan shares and more than $80 million of Wyeth, comprising almost 14 percent of the fund’s holdings. Cohen also had $293 million of Wyeth and $95 million of Elan in his personal portfolio.

There are signs that the investment was generating considerable excitement around the office. As the positions ballooned, Cohen’s personal assistant, Kate Mattox—who listened to practically every conversation her boss had every workday via the famous Steve-cam, which broadcast Cohen’s movements across the trading floor—asked senior management for permission to open a personal trading account. There were only two stocks she wanted to buy: Elan and Wyeth. The firm said no. (Mattox has since left SAC; a SAC spokesperson declined to comment.)

On July 17, almost two weeks before the final drug trial results were due to be released, Dr. Gilman, the overseer of the trial, received a 24-page PowerPoint presentation from the companies containing the results. They were not good. Later that afternoon, the government alleges, he and Martoma talked for almost two hours by phone, and then again the next day. On the morning of Sunday, July 20, Martoma sent a message to Cohen saying that it was important that they speak. No one, aside from Cohen and Martoma, knows what was said during the 20-minute phone call that followed, which Cohen conducted from his home. The following day, Cohen’s head trader started liquidating SAC’s Elan and Wyeth shares, ultimately selling their entire holding and then shorting millions of shares of each. On July 30, after the negative bapineuzumab results became public, both Elan and Wyeth’s share prices dropped, yielding profits and avoided losses to SAC of around $275 million, according to the government. Martoma earned a $9.3 million bonus that year.

Horvath was sitting on a bombshell of his own. He learned that Dell’s August quarter was going to be a disappointment. In late August, Steinberg started shorting Dell based on Horvath’s advice. By Aug. 25, three days before the company was due to report earnings, Steinberg had amassed a short position of more than $3 million.

That day, Horvath received an e-mail from [email protected], an address where analysts were supposed to send their best ideas so Cohen could trade on them. “Cohen Sector Position Alert,” read the subject line. “Please reply with any comments or updates you have on the Cohen Account positions below.” The accompanying chart showed that COHE, Cohen’s personal SAC trading account, owned Dell. Horvath felt a pit in his stomach. He and Steinberg were betting that Dell would go down, while Cohen was betting it would go up.

“Steve didn’t like losing money,” Horvath said later—something of an understatement, as Cohen was known for rages prompted by losing trades. “You were kind of in the bad books if you lost him money.” He forwarded the e-mail to Steinberg with the note: “steve is long DELL…”.

Steinberg replied, “Interesting… I have not mentioned anything to him yet. I would like to express our view to him, but we need to properly weigh the r.r. [risk-reward] of doing so. How high is your conviction here, scale of 1—10, 10 being maximal conviction?”

Horvath went and checked again with Tortora to see that his source was still predicting a disappointing quarter. He also called Dell’s investor-relations department to see what he could glean from the company’s “body language.” Both Horvath and Steinberg e-mailed back and forth with another SAC portfolio manager, Gabriel Plotkin, who had an enormous, $60 million long position in Dell and who had been “tagged” in Cohen’s portfolio as the impetus behind his trade, which meant that he would earn a share of Cohen’s Dell profits, if there were any. Around 12:30 p.m. the next day, Steinberg e-mailed Plotkin and Horvath: “I was talking to Steve about DELL earlier, and he asked me to get the two of you to compare notes before the print, as we are on opposite sides of this one…”. Horvath, who was in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, wrote back to both of them what later became an infamous e-mail:

“I have a 2nd hand read from someone at the company—this is 3rd quarter I have gotten this read from them and it has been very good in the last two quarters,” he said, before enumerating Tortora’s gross margin, revenue, and earnings predictions, which showed a sharp disappointment for Dell. “Please keep to yourself as obviously not well known.” Steinberg added a postscript: “Yes normally we would never divulge data like this so please be discreet. Thanks.” To a savvy trader, what Horvath was saying was clear: A reliable source inside Dell had tipped him off about the earnings in advance.

What happened next represents something of a brush with the legal abyss for Cohen. Plotkin forwarded the “2nd hand read” e-mail to Anthony Vaccarino, another SAC portfolio manager who had been instructed to keep Cohen informed about how the others were trading Dell. Vaccarino forwarded the e-mail to Cohen, who was at his house in East Hampton, N.Y. Then Vaccarino called him on his cell phone. During the next two hours, the government has alleged, Cohen sold his entire long position of 500,000 Dell shares. After the earnings announcement, Dell dropped 14 percent, its largest selloff in eight years. Cohen denies that he sold the shares based on Horvath’s “2nd hand read” e-mail, and cites the actions of Plotkin and others as driving his decision to sell.

Later that evening, Cohen sent Steinberg a message that read: “Nice job on dell.” Steinberg’s response was, “Thanks… this ole dog can still hunt”.

Steinberg’s team tried to repeat their success three months later. Lehman Brothers had gone bankrupt on Sept. 15, and Washington Mutual had been seized by regulators 10 days later, becoming the largest bank failure in history. In early October, the head of the International Monetary Fund said that the global economy was on the “brink of systemic meltdown.” As Horvath would later put it: “The world seemed to be ending.” The SEC choked off one of the traders’ only remaining avenues for making money when it tightened the rules surrounding short selling after the Lehman collapse in an effort to stabilize the plunging market.

Cohen, once again, found his trading in conflict with that of Horvath and Steinberg, who had built a long position in Dell, Horvath says, based on information from Tortora. On Nov. 14, Cohen held an Instant Message chat with Steinberg:

AIM:mike72ms [Steinberg] dell rpts thrusday
AIM:cas— [Cohen] y …
AIM:mike72ms we like it…weve been good here if u remember
AIM:cas— call me… it’s a shame-cause I can be helpful to you too but that;s life
AIM:mike72ms steve I have an analyst that covers this stock… he has industry contacts… im not hiding anything from u

The exceedingly cautious Cohen replied: “I would prefer to talkon phone”.

Steinberg, concerned that the boss was angry, recounted the exchange to Horvath later, providing the strongest explanation yet of why Cohen was not charged for his Dell trades: “I told him not to be short and he got pissed, drilling me… who is telling me business is ok,” Steinberg wrote, describing his conversation with Cohen. “I said Jon has a number of industry contacts and that is what he has heard through supply datapoints and he was not pleased…total bulls- - -.” In other words, Horvath later testified, he and Steinberg had hidden from Cohen where they were getting their information.


Government investigators say that by the end of 2007, trading on inside information had permeated the hedge fund industry, fed by expert-networking firms which connected traders with insiders at public companies who could leak them valuable data. But the 2008 financial crisis threw sand on some of the government’s plans. The market became so volatile, and so many funds lost money, that it became pointless to try to press charges over trades that investigators were convinced were illegal but ultimately didn’t yield any profits, according to people connected with the investigation. If 2008 hadn’t happened, some of them believe, they might have actually captured their white whale—Cohen—and many other targets.

In 2010, Martoma was terminated by SAC for failing to replicate his success with Elan. A few months before that, he’d written an e-mail to Cohen and some of his top executives: “SAC is a special place to me. Having attended graduate and undergraduate programs at Harvard, Stanford and Duke; founded/sold my own healthcare company; and worked as a Director at the largest federally funded science initiative in the last 3 decades, I have a variety of experiences to compare against my time at SAC,” he said. “Through it all, it’s clear to me that I am in my element here at SAC.”

Perhaps the e-mail explains why, despite repeated invitations, Martoma has so far declined to cooperate with the government in its investigation of Cohen, leaving Martoma with the possibility of a long prison sentence and prompting conspiracy theories over what might be motivating him. Steinberg, a father of two small children, must wait until April to learn what his sentence will be; although guidelines suggest that he could get up to 85 years for the five counts on which he was convicted, the relatively small profits of $1.4 million he made on his trades mean that he’ll likely end up sentenced to a handful of years. He plans to appeal his conviction.

Despite the dogged efforts of investigators, Cohen appears to have avoided a comparably stiff punishment. Might things have turned out differently? If Cohen had engaged with Steinberg over instant message in November 2008, indicating some knowledge of where his employees’ illegal edge came from; if Martoma had told him about his alleged conversations with Dr. Gilman, which prompted SAC’s sales of Elan and Wyeth that week in July, and if Martoma went on to tell that to the FBI—it might be Cohen awaiting sentencing now rather than one of his top associates.

Instead, Cohen continues to live in a 35,000-square-foot mansion and buy and sell the high-priced art he’s become known for. He’s been telling people that he plans to rebuild SAC as soon as possible.

Kolhatkar is a features editor and national correspondent for Bloomberg Businessweek. Follow her on Twitter @Sheelahk.

 

[winnipegjets]

Re: After Increasing CPF Min Sum, Ho Jinx Took Another USD 500M to Gamble. 60%, Song

Investors are avoiding tainted firms and those former employees. Not Temasek.

 

[winnipegjets]

Re: After Increasing CPF Min Sum, Ho Jinx Took Another USD 500M to Gamble. 60%, Song

Luo, who was at SAC for 10 years, had run SAC's Asia- Pacific operations since 2007. Prior to that, he was a senior member of SAC's risk-management team in the firm's Stamford-based headquarters since joining in 2002.

 

[winnipegjets]

Re: After Increasing CPF Min Sum, Ho Jinx Took Another USD 500M to Gamble. 60%, Song

SAC Capital's Luo to join Dymon as president as fund grows
Bloomberg News
Published 9:10 pm, Monday, April 16, 2012

Dymon Asia Capital (Singapore) Pte, the best-performing large hedge fund in Asia last year, hired Jay Luo, former head of SAC Capital Advisors LP's Asia-Pacific operations, allowing Dymon's founder to focus on investing.

Luo, 44, who headed the Asia office in Hong Kong for the $13 billion hedge fund run by Steven A. Cohen, will join Singapore-based Dymon as president and a partner in June, said Dymon founder Danny Yong. Luo will be based in Hong Kong, focusing on strengthening risk management and operations. The appointment is subject to approval from regulators, Yong said.

The hiring will allow Yong to focus on trading as his firm expanded assets under management to $2.85 billion in February, including $2.5 billion in its main macro fund. The macro fund in 2011 had a more than 20 percent return, the most in Asia among hedge funds with assets of more than $1 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

"Jay has impeccable track record in Asia, helping SAC build the Asia business," said Will Tan, managing director at Singapore-based recruiting firm Principle Partners Pte. "The biggest plus for Dymon would be Jay's track record in building a hedge-fund business."

Dymon's Asian macro fund started trading in August 2008 with $113 million of initial capital from Paul Tudor Jones's Tudor Investment Corp., the Greenwich-based hedge fund, as well as partners and employees, according to the firm. It started accepting money from outside investors in August 2009, after it separated from Abax Global Capital Ltd., the asset manager part-owned by Morgan Stanley.

Dymon Asia Macro Fund -- which seeks to profit from macroeconomic trends by wagering on bonds, currencies, stocks and commodities -- has lost about 2 percent this year, Yong said. A Eurekahedge Pte index that tracks macro funds in Asia gained 1 percent through March.

Luo, who was at SAC for 10 years, had run SAC's Asia- Pacific operations since 2007. Prior to that, he was a senior member of SAC's risk-management team in the firm's Stamford-based headquarters since joining in 2002.

"Jay's risk-management experience is crucial in helping us to further refine and institutionalize our risk-management processes and controls, and continue to pursue our core focus of delivering performance through prudent monitoring and management of the investment portfolio and financial markets which we invest in," said Yong in an interview in Singapore today. "SAC is clearly one of the best hedge funds in the world with outstanding risk-management practices."

Luo quit the hedge fund to pursue other opportunities, said three people with knowledge of his resignation last week, asking not to be identified because the information is private.

Luo, a Chinese native, graduated from Beijing University with a bachelor of science in physics in 1987 and then obtained a Ph.D at Pennsylvania State University in biophysics chemistry in 1996.

 

[winnipegjets]

Re: After Increasing CPF Min Sum, Ho Jinx Took Another USD 500M to Gamble. 60%, Song

So, Jay was a top honcho in SAC ...in 2012, he jumped ship before the ship sank.

 

[chonburifc]

Re: After Increasing CPF Min Sum, Ho Jinx Took Another USD 500M to Gamble. 60%, Song

What's the big deal? Stinkees really one kind. Like that also want to complain.

PAPPIES so kind to make Stinkees delay withdrawal of See Pee Eff, so Stinkees can work until 90. I recommend See Pee Eff withdrawal age should set to infinity and minimum sum should be set to SGD 2 million.

hahaha hehehe hihihi hohoho huhuhu

 

[da dick]

Re: After Increasing CPF Min Sum, Ho Jinx Took Another USD 500M to Gamble. 60%, Song

... RRJ was founded by Charles Ong, once Temasek’s CIO...

read this part enough already. sure lose money. anyone playing stocks should go short sell them immediately or maybe right after erection

 

[Narong Wongwan]

Re: After Increasing CPF Min Sum, Ho Jinx Took Another USD 500M to Gamble. 60%, Song

有钱不赌 对不起父母

赌光输光 为国争光

 

[palden]

Re: After Increasing CPF Min Sum, Ho Jinx Took Another USD 500M to Gamble. 60%, Song

HUAT ah. We are contributing to the world's economy. The Lees transformed Stinkapore and now the world.

Temasek Invests in Dymon Asia to Start Hedge-Fund Platform By Tomoko Yamazaki and Bei Hu May 12, 2014 12:19 PM GMT+0800




<figure class="hide_caption image_focus sml_lede toggle_caption"> <figcaption>Photographer: Munshi Ahmed/Bloomberg </figcaption>Temasek has in recent years made other alternative investments such as those in hedge funds, private equity and real estate through or with local companies. Close

Temasek has in recent years made other alternative investments such as those in hedge... Read More

Close
Open Photographer: Munshi Ahmed/Bloomberg Temasek has in recent years made other alternative investments such as those in hedge funds, private equity and real estate through or with local companies.





</figure><section class="ad_medium">

</section> Temasek Holdings Pte, the Singapore state-owned investment company, will start a venture with Dymon Asia Capital (Singapore) Pte to back new hedge fund managers and strategies as it becomes a minority stakeholder in the firm.

Temasek committed $500 million initially that will be managed by Dymon, a hedge-fund manager based in the island-state, according to Dymon President Jay Luo. Luo and Dymon Managing Director Ben Freischmidt will be leading the new venture for Dymon, according to an e-mailed statement.

The partnership will allow Temasek to diversify its investment and returns through a local company, and enable Dymon, one of Asia’s largest hedge funds, to add to its traditional business of running macro funds by providing non-investment services to help managers start their own pools.

“Temasek is as long-term and stable as it gets, and Dymon is a Singapore success story in the hedge-fund world,” said Will Tan, a managing director at Singapore-based recruitment company Principle Partners Pte, whose clients include hedge funds. “The strategic investment into Dymon bodes well for both parties as Temasek gets to diversify its investments using the Dymon platform and Dymon gets the backing of an established” state investment company.
[h=2]Temasek Confirmed[/h]Temasek spokesman Stephen Forshaw confirmed the partnership in an e-mail. The statement didn’t disclose the size of Temasek’s stake while Luo didn’t elaborate when asked by phone. Dymon, which started trading as a macro hedge fund manager in August 2008 with $113 million of assets and the backing of Paul Tudor Jones’s Tudor Investment Corp., has since expanded assets to more than $4 billion across various alternative strategies.
The partnership comes at a time when investors prefer large, established companies, starving small, new hedge funds of capital. The number of new hedge funds started sank to a three-year low last year and liquidations surged to the highest since 2009, according to Chicago-based Hedge Fund Research Inc.

“We are very excited to establish this relationship with Temasek,” Luo said in the statement. “We share a long-term vision of working with the best managers and believe our proposition to managers and investors is unique.”
[h=2]Carl Vine[/h]The Temasek-Dymon venture’s first investment will be in a global equity long-short hedge fund focused on the Asia-Pacific region and led by Carl Vine, a former SAC Capital Advisors LP manager, according to Luo. Vine, based in Oxford, the U.K., plans to start the Port Meadow Fund with an initial fundraising limit of $500 million in the third quarter.

“Dymon has shown in the last six years that they know the alternative business and have grown into one of Asia’s largest hedge funds,” Tan said.

Dymon’s macro fund in 2011 had a more than 20 percent return, the most in Asia among hedge funds with assets of more than $1 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

In 2012, it hired Luo, a former Asia head of Steven A. Cohen’s SAC, as president and a partner. Freischmidt, the chief operating officer of the new platform business, was a founding member of GLG Partners LP’s Asia long-short equity business, according to the statement.
[h=2]Alternative Investments[/h]Dymon last year raised S$203 million ($162 million) for the first close of a private-equity fund to invest in small- and medium-sized companies in Singapore and Southeast Asia, Keith Tan, Dymon managing partner, said then. Heliconia, a Temasek unit, invested in the fund, Jeffrey Fang, a spokesman at the state investment company, told Bloomberg News at the time.

Temasek has in recent years made other alternative investments such as those in hedge funds, private equity and real estate through or with local companies.

The state investment firm in August 2009 set up a wholly owned company called Seatown Holdings Pte with committed capital of more than S$4 billion to invest in assets including stocks and bonds globally.

In January 2012, it announced the establishment of Pavilion Capital Pte, a wholly owned company run by former Temasek Chief Investment Officer Tow Heng Tan, to invest in privately held businesses in North Asia including China.

Seatown and RRJ Capital Ltd. earlier this year invested $250 million in a Chinese logistics warehouse developer, Shanghai Yupei Group Co., according to an April statement by the Chinese company. RRJ was founded by Charles Ong, once Temasek’s CIO and Seatown chief executive officer, and his brother, Richard Ong, who had been a Goldman Sachs Group Inc. partner.

To contact the reporters on this story: Tomoko Yamazaki in Singapore at [email protected]; Bei Hu in Hong Kong at [email protected]
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Andreea Papuc at [email protected] Iain McDonald