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George Soros’s hedge fund Soros Fund Management sold its stake in a widely used gold exchange-traded fund in the third quarter, according to a regulatory filing out Monday. The fund reported no stake in the SPDR Gold Trust GLD, +0.58%  in the period ended Sept. 30. That’s after disclosing a position worth $30.4 million in a second-quarter filing. The storied billionaire investor had attracted attention during the second quarter for being generally bearish on world markets — and scooping up safety-play gold.

The effect on Mezvinsky’s hedge fund has been gruesome. It raised $25 million for its investments, but had already lost about 40 percent of its value by early 2015. Rather than shuttering the fund then, Mezvinsky pressed ahead.

Visium Asset Management, a multibillion dollar hedge fund, has imploded in the biggest scandal to hit the industry in years. The fund told investors of its plan to close in a letter Friday. It’s the most high-profile shutdown since authorities forced Steve Cohen’s controversial SAC Capital to close in 2013. A slew of factors — from a brewing insider-trading scandal to a contentious investment by Visium’s founder that rankled investors and staffers alike — led to Visium’s demise. On top of all of that, Visium’s flagship fund had been reporting dismal performance. Visium is selling one of its better performing...

Tuesday .... Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump began his general election pivot by going on the offense against presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, adding that she "turned the State Department into her private hedge fund." Trump said, "Hillary Clinton turned the State Department into her private hedge fund. The Russians, the Saudis, the Chinese, all gave money to Bill and Hillary and got favorable treatment in return. It's a sad day in America when foreign governments with deep pockets have more influence in our own country than our great citizens. I didn't need to do this. It's not easy,...

Greg Nash The House Ethics Committee publicly acknowledged Monday it is conducting a review into Florida Senate candidate Rep. Alan Grayson. In a statement, the panel said it will issue a decision on whether to open a formal investigation into Grayson's activities by April 5. If the committee decides not to proceed with an investigation, it must release the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE) report on the case. Grayson's management of a hedge fund while serving as a member of Congress has been looming over the Aug. 30 Senate Democratic primary. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) earlier this...

U.S. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid on Friday called for U.S. Rep. Alan Grayson to drop out of the race for a Senate seat in Florida. Reid said in a statement that Grayson claims to be progressive but seems to have "no moral compass." He said Grayson used his office to unethically promote a hedge fund that until recently had been based in the Cayman Islands. Grayson is running in the Democratic primary to replace U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio. His campaign did not immediately respond to Reid's call to quit the race. ...

Donald J. Trump ‏@realDonaldTrump: "Wow! Ted Cruz received $487K in campaign contributions, $11M from a NY hedge fund mogul, & $1M low int. loan from Goldman Sachs. Hypocrite"

Ending almost two years in limbo, the financially beleaguered Daughters of Charity Health System on Monday announced it has closed a $260 million investment deal with an East Coast hedge fund that will keep one of the Bay Area's oldest hospital chains afloat for at least three more years. The news came 11 days after California Attorney General Kamala Harris gave her conditional approval for the largest nonprofit hospital transaction in state history, and the first to involve a hedge fund. Unlike the controversy and staunch opposition generated by the hospitals' previous suitor, the deal with BlueMountain Capital Management registered...

On Monday, we got some color on Hillary Clinton’s $350 billion plan to make college more affordable. Students and former students across the country owe more than $1.2 trillion in college loans, and as Bill Ackman so eloquently put it earlier this year, "there’s no way they’re going to pay it back." The fact that America’s student loan bubble is the focus of what may well end up being one of Clinton’s most expensive policy proposals speaks volumes about the urgency of the problem. Of course there are some other folks who understand how quickly the situation is deteriorating. Chief...

Talk about a horrible way to start the week. A number of hedge funds that were already bracing for losses on Greek debt also found out late Sunday night that they would likely have to swallow big losses on investments in Puerto Rico as well. [SNIP!] ...Another loser in Greece has been Marc Mezvinsky, the husband of former, and potentially future, first child Chelsea Clinton. Mezvinsky’s firm EagleVale, which has made bets in Greece, was down nearly 4% last year. A small fund the firm runs that is completely dedicated to investing in Greece was down 48%.

Jon S. Corzine, the embattled former MF Global Holdings Ltd. chief executive and ex-chairman of Goldman Sachs Group Inc., has discussed plans to start his own hedge fund in recent months, according to people familiar with the matter. The fund would start with cash from Mr. Corzine’s personal wealth and a handful of outside investors. Mr. Corzine said he had been speaking with about a half-dozen potential investors, and projected around $150 million in assets under management, one of the people said. The plans are tentative and could evolve or fall apart in coming months. But a launch would mark...

No, that is not the number of hits his blog posts got, neither is that what Ben Bernanke will make as the most recent employee of Citadel (at least not for a few years until the the eponymously named helicopter makes a landing and hyperinflation runs wild).It is also not the assets under management held by HFT titan, and Bernanke's new employer, Citadel. As Citadel reminds us in its regulatory filing with the SEC, "as of December 31, 2014, in Funds managed on a discretionary basis, we had approximately $23,804,000,000 in net assets under management."Only.So what does the number...

The New York Times totally threw shade at Bill and Hillary Clinton's son-in-law, Marc Mezvinsky. Matt Goldstein and Steve Eder wrote an article in The New York Times suggesting that Mezvinsky —who is married to Chelsea Clinton —had been able to gain access to investors with ties to the Clintons for the hedge fund he cofounded that has had "underwhelming returns."About a month ago, The Wall Street Journal published a report about the fund's underperformance since its inception. The Times' report focuses primarily on Mezvinsky and his role in fund-raising and strategizing for the fund. Back in 2011, Mezvinsky, now...

Despite having Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein as an investor and being Bill and Hillary Clinton's son-in-law, Marc Mezvinsky (and two former colleagues from Goldman Sachs who manage Eaglevale Partners hedge fund) told investors in a letter sent last week they had been "incorrect" on Greece, helping produce losses for the firm’s main fund during two of the past three years. By 'incorrect' Chelsea Clinton's husband means the Eaglevale fund focused on Greece lost a stunning 48% last year and, as The Wall Street Journal reports, is impacting the overall returns of the roughly $400 million fund which has spent...

Miami-based Everest Capital Fund was knocked down last week after the Swiss National Bank unexpectedly allowed the Swiss franc to trade freely against to the euro, according to a report from Bloomberg . The $830 million fund has reportedly been wiped out, according to media reports.

Yesterday, when we got the first news of huge P&L losses at various publicly-traded banks not to mention the collapse of several retail brokers culminating with the bailout of FXCM by Jefferies, we reminded that seconds after the SNB shocker, we tweeted what was quite obvious to anyone who realized that speculators were most short the CHF since the summer of 2013. We also added that "We have yet to find out just which hedge funds were blown up yesterday", for the simple reason that unlike public banks who have an obligation to reveal news, especially bad, to their shareholders,...

The hedge fund founded and, until recently, run by billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer was involved in a deal to sell a stake in a Russian oil company to a Russian oligarch who is the target of U.S. sanctions. Farallon Capital Management sold a part of its stake in Russian firm Geotech Oil Services to the Volga Group, a Luxembourg-based investment firm owned by Russian billionaire Gennady Timchenko, in 2010. Four years later, in April 2014, the U.S. Treasury Department announced that it would target Timchenko, Volga, and a number of companies associated with them, in a round of sanctions aimed...

A curious finding emerged in the latest 13F by Soros Fund Management, the family office investment vehicle managing the personal wealth of George Soros. Actually, two curious findings: the first was that the disclosed Assets Under Management as of December 31, 2013 rose to a record $11.8 billion (this excludes netting and margin, and whatever one-time positions Soros may have gotten an SEC exemption to not disclose: for a recent instance of this, see Greenlight Capital's Micron fiasco, and the subsequent lawsuit of Seeking Alpha which led to the breach of David Einhorn's holdings confidentiality). The second one is that...

OCTOBER 17, 2009 Rajaratnam Surfaced in U.S. Terrorism Probe By EVAN PEREZ and MATTHEW ROSENBERG WASHINGTON—The hedge-fund billionaire charged as part of a vast insider-trading case surfaced in an earlier, separate probe into U.S. fundraising by a Sri Lankan terrorist group, people familiar with the probe said. As part of that investigation, federal agents said they uncovered documents showing that Raj Rajaratnam, founder of the Galleon Group, was among several wealthy Sri Lankans in the U.S. whose donations to a Maryland-based charity made their way to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, according to people familiar with the probe. Raj...

I value anybody working to make this country I love and honor, America, as great as it has been and so much greater than it is now. Senator Dick “Dimples” Durbin pulled the earnings gap out of the Democratic Party closet and pummeled hedge fund managers for making too much money in comparison to Navy SEALS. He feels there’s an immoral disparity between what this nation pays its warriors and what hedge fund managers earn in private industry. This proves a point: the Democratic Party leadership is composed of wealthy people saying “don’t do as I do; do as I...