>>> In May 8 letter, Greece PM Tsipras threatened to withhold €750M repayment du

In May 8 letter, Greece PM Tsipras threatened to withhold €750M repayment due in May unless European partners provided liquidity immediately [*Note: Athens made the payment 4 days later] - Greece press 

- In the May 8th letter Tsipras asked again that the ECB raise Greece's treasury bill issuance ceiling. He also asked for a partial disbursement of €7.3B in loan tranches, and the return of €1.9B of payments Greece has made into the EFSF bailout fund and €1.2B in profits the ECB made from buying Greek govt bonds since 2010.
- In the end, Greece made the repayment on time (May 12) by tapping its accounts at the IMF.

>>> Barron's summary: positive on LVLT, MEG; cautious on MSFT; highlights potent

Barron's summary: positive on LVLT, MEG; cautious on MSFT; highlights potential activist targets (VRSN, XLNX, MDT, COH 

Cover story: Profile of Lyrical Asset Management, which oversees more than $3B, including $2.5B in its flagship Lyrical U.S. Value Equity fund, No. 14 on Barron's Penta 2015 ranking of the 100 Best Hedge Funds; The fund "only replaces stocks a couple of times a year, follows a set valuation formula, and owns exactly 33 U.S. stocks"; During three years through 2014, it returned 27.62% a year, net of fees.

Features: 1) Positive on LVLT: Fiberoptic network provider "is well-positioned for the broadband explosion" that could see usage tripled in the coming years; shares could rise 20%, in addition to which it owns valuable assets; 2) Positive on MEG: Synergies from acquisition of Young Broadcasting and LIN Media, along with greater free cash flow generated by the deals, could push the stock up 50% in the next two years.

Tech Trader: Cautious on MSFT: Tiernan Ray says that despite seemingly fresh thinking from chief Satya Nadella, the tech giant remains too obsessed with Windows; It should instead become a development platform for mobile and Web computing, a process it could jump-start by acquiring coding-tool startup Xamarin.

Trader: A catalyst to propel the market out of its range trading could be the growing conviction a September Fed rate hike won't happen, says Adam Sarhan of Sarhan Capital; Positive on RL: Though fashion company faces near-term challenges, none are insurmountable; Wall Street's gloomy outlook seems overdone, and results are likely to show sustainable improvement later in the fiscal year; Cautious on WIN: Networking communications company is a short-term buy, not a long-term investment, and requires vigilance on the part of investors.

Small Caps: Cautious on BCO: Armored truck firm has struggled amid banking consolidation and sector competition, and following a recent rally it may be time to take profits.

Profile: Michael Kass, portfolio manager, Baron Emerging Markets, which focuses on growing entrepreneurial companies (top ten holdings: Haitong Securities, Samsung Electronics, Sinopharm Group, China Telecom, Steinhoff International Holdings, Torrent Pharma, China Mobile, Taiwan Semi Manufacturing, Tencent Holdings, Axis Bank).

Follow-Up: Private investors are seeking growth opportunities in companies such as Uber and Lyft, even though the IPO market hasn't been living up to expectations; Negative on ITT: For-profit education company continues to face myriad problems, and shares have plummeted as regulators try to track its industry-high student loan defaults; Cautious on AMTD: Long-term growth prospects are good, but the stock "is vulnerable to further dithering over rates," and investors should consider taking some profits for now.

European Trader: Positive on Syngenta: Even if tie-up with MON doesn't come through, investors can still profit from chemical company's plan to generate savings and efficiencies; + Delhaize: Shares are up 60% since last April, but they may still have more upside if Royal Ahold merger goes through.

Asian Trader: Slowdown in India's stock market is likely to continue, barring big economic changes; Of the big four Indian infotech vendors, Tata may be the best choice for investors.

Emerging Markets: Lower oil prices could continue to have a negative effect on Russian and Nigerian stocks and Venezuelan debt, but could benefit importers such as India, Indonesia, and Turkey.

Commodities: Some investors think aluminum's big gains will ease even as other metals push higher. 

CEO Spotlight: L'Oreal chief executive Jean-Paul Agon believes digital technology can transform the relationship between consumers and brands.

Streetwise: Companies that could be potential targets for activist investors include VRSN, XLNX, MDT, and COH.

>>> Aveva attracts interest from European and US bidders (schneider, GE, Emerson

Aveva attracts interest from European and US bidders 

Aveva, the listed UK software group, has attracted the interest of a number of US and European groups, the Sunday Times reported.

The French energy group Schneider Electric, Connecticut-based conglomerate General Electric (GE) and Missouri-based Emerson are considering making offers, the article noted, citing financial sources.

The report said Schneider is already understood to have negotiated with banks over an offer for Aveva. Schneider wants to merge Aveva with Ivensys, the software group specialising in the oil and gas sector it acquired in 2013, as this would achieve GBP 100m in synergies, the item added.

GE and Emerson will look at Aveva's latest results and for a fall in its share price before considering a bid, the report noted.

The item noted private equity firms appear reluctant to bid, and are unlikely to try to match the same offers that are likely to come from industrial bidders.

The report estimated Aveva's value at GBP 1bn (EUR 1.373bn)

Source Sunday Times

>>> Courregges looks to attract outside investor - MF Fashion

Courregges looks to attract outside investor - MF Fashion

Courreges, the privately-held Paris-based fashion house, is looking to attract an outside investor, Italian language daily MF Fashion reported. The report cited Courreges co-owners Frederic Torloting and Jacques Bungert as saying that they wanted to sell an unspecified holding for EUR 20m. The report cited the owners as saying that they intended to retain control of the company.

The report noted that Courreges has turnover of EUR 20m.

MF Fashion

(Barron's) Breguet Watches: A History of Innovation



Breguet Watches: A History of Innovation

How Swatch revived the spirit of the greatest watchmaker who ever lived.

Breguet, the illustrious Swiss watchmaker, can cast a spell over you. I know this is so. Back in 1999, a friend of mine from the online watch community read an in-flight magazine article on Breguet—about its rich history dating back to the 18th century and how it is still making modern high-end watches—and the story so captivated him that he decided to become a watchmaker. He promptly enrolled in a watchmaking school full-time, and is now a rising star at a major watch company.

Anatomy of a $189,000 Breguet Watch

Penta watch columnist Paul Boutros explains the technological innovations, and craftsmanship, behind two of Breguet’s latest models.

Breguet’s history is that inspiring. And now, on its 240th anniversary, the company has just introduced new versions of its Tradition watch series, where the movements re-imagine the firm’s elegant 18th century pocket-watch aesthetics. A new automatic Tradition has a cool seconds subdial counting down 60 seconds before snapping back; an all-new minute repeater delicately chimes the hours. But the brand’s essence starts with Abraham-Louis Breguet, universally considered the greatest watchmaker of all time.

Breguet was born in 1747 in Neuchâtel, now part of Switzerland, and was just 11 years old when his father died. He worked for a watchmaker during his early teens, and moved to Paris in 1762 to become an apprentice under a watchmaker close to the Royal Court in Versailles. Near the center of French power, Breguet was mentored by several important figures who helped pass on a profound grasp of science and watchmaking. Among them: Ferdinand Berthoud, a watchmaker famous for precision clocks and marine chronometers, and Jean-Antoine Lépine, whose eponymous movement paved the way for thin watches that could comfortably fit in a gentleman’s pocket.


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Breguet’s top La Tradition Tourbillon costs $189,700.Photograph: Courtesy of Breguet

Breguet founded his own watchmaking company in 1775 on the Quai de l’Horloge, on the banks of the River Seine near Notre Dame in Paris, setting out to technically advance watchmaking while placing equal emphasis on timepiece aesthetics. Thanks to the use of Lépine’s caliber, Breguet’s watches were, in the words of novelist Honoré de Balzac, “deliciously thin.” Breguet’s first major innovation was the Perpétuelle—the world’s first properly functioning self-winding watch. The Perpétuelle was perfected in 1780, and one of the first buyers was Queen Marie Antoinette, who purchased many watches from Breguet.

Famous for inventing the mesmerizing and gravity-defying tourbillon in 1801, Breguet also invented the pare-chute shock-protection mechanism—the basis for all modern shock-absorption systems protecting mechanical watches from damage when dropped. Perhaps less well known is his invention of the flat hammers and circular gongs used in nearly all minute repeaters, enabling striking watches to be thinner than ever.

Breguet also threw aside fancy ornamentation, common at the time, and instead created elegant and refined designs for his cases and dials. His numeral typography was made of slender and elegant Arabic numbers, known as Breguet numerals. In 1783, he introduced narrow pointed hands with an apple-shaped hole at their tips, now universally called Breguet hands. These timeless hallmarks of his style are still in use today, not only by the modern Breguet company, but also by brands like Patek Philippe and Cartier. Breguet collector Glen de Vries, co-founder and president of the life-science software company Medidata Solutions, says, “Are there really any hands more beautiful than Breguet hands? Are there really any typographic approaches more beautiful than Breguet numerals?”

Accomplished descendants took over the firm at Breguet’s death. His grandson and great-grandson were instrumental in developing the early telegraph and telephone, helping to launch their adoption across Europe. Their success in the electronics field finally led them to hand over the watchmaking company in 1870 to their top watchmaker, Edward Brown, while another descendant built Breguet Aviation, the firm that eventually became Dassault Aviation.

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The Classique Chronométrie with its hyper-precise timekeeping. Photograph: Courtesy of Breguet

The Brown family led Breguet for the next 100 years, producing top-quality, Swiss-made luxury watches, while also supplying aviation instruments to Breguet Aviation, and military wristwatches, like the fiercely collected Type XX chronograph, to the French air force.

Enter the modern age. The jeweler Chaumet bought Breguet in 1970, and guided the brand through the low-cost quartz-watch revolution. Chaumet increased production but lost money on the brand every year until its bankruptcy in 1987, when the Bahrain-based private-equity pioneer Investcorp bought the watchmaker. In 1992, Investcorp acquired the movement maker Nouvelle Lemania, known for its exceptional chronograph movements found in many brands’ watches, including Omega’s legendary Speedmaster.

But the investment that was needed never happened under Chaumet or Investcorp, and Breguet’s sales and image lagged behind rivals’. Competitors like Patek Philippe and A. Lange & Söhne launched all new, in-house movements with state-of-the-art features, and offered them at lower retail prices than similar Breguet watches. That is when Breguet caught the eye of watch impresario Nicolas Hayek and his rapidly growing Swatch Group.

With the sales of Speedmasters rising fast in the late 1990s—the result of Swatch’s Omega turnaround (see Penta’s “Omega’s New Beginning,” Nov. 29, 2014)—Hayek wanted to buy the model’s movement maker, Nouvelle Lemania. Investcorp had united the firm with Breguet under the name Groupe Horloger Breguet; Hayek had to acquire the watch brand, as well.

Hayek did so in September 1999, and quickly realized that Breguet could be his vehicle to take on the industry’s most exclusive high-end watch brands. He promptly invested 15 million Swiss francs ($15.5 million) to refurbish Nouvelle Lemania, while integrating it with Breguet. Renamed Manufacture Breguet, the outfit could suddenly make entire Breguet watches, not just the movements.

All-new, in-house Breguet movements were created with the house’s signature invention—the tourbillon—at the core of Hayek’s early offerings. No slouch at promotion, Hayek trumpeted the 200th anniversary of the tourbillon’s patent date with a 2001 blowout party at Versailles. Sales of the gravity-smoothing tourbillon watches went from 150 in 1999 to 1,000 within five years. Other brands took note, and tourbillon production skyrocketed across the entire mechanical-watch industry as a direct result of Breguet’s intense marketing efforts.

Today, Breguet’s most prestigious tourbillon is the 2013-released La Tradition Tourbillon. Building on the original tourbillon from 1801, it incorporates modern materials throughout its in-house movement and components. The Tradition elements are mostly aesthetic, hearkening back to the brand’s original 18th and 19th century designs. It features, for example, an enormous tourbillon cage made of titanium. A constant-force mechanism ensures tightly regulated timekeeping as the watch’s power source—the mainspring—unwinds and loses energy, and that, too, affects the watch’s look. The tiered conical gear it uses is visible at 5 o’clock; a 155-link finely finished steel chain that connects to the mainspring is found at 9 o’clock. Available in rose gold, yellow gold, and platinum, it retails from $174,800 to $189,700.

But La Tradition’s innovations are mostly evolutionary. In contrast, the 2014 Classique Chronométrie 7727 deploys a revolutionary magnetic based escapement, which significantly improves timekeeping precision, and best captures, I feel, the technical ingenuity of Abraham-Louis Breguet. Marc Hayek, the current CEO of Breguet and other brands, and grandson of Nicolas Hayek, agrees. “The quest for precision was so important to him,” he says of Abraham-Louis.

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A vintage aviation watch, inspiration for a new line of Breguet watches coming soon. Photograph: Courtesy of Breguet

In an unexpected twist, Breguet employed magnetism, the bane of mechanical watches, to re-engineer the most important component of accurate timekeeping—the escapement. Generally, the escapement’s balance wheel and its coiled hairspring oscillate back and forth to regulate the unwinding of the mainspring. The wheel itself is mounted on a shaft with pivots at each end, which for centuries have been inserted into pivot jewels. But since the pivots are in constant contact with the pivot jewels, the shaft is subject to varying amounts of friction due to gravity, and that hurts accuracy.

Breguet “broke free of horological taboos,” claims Hayek, and used magnetic force to redress the pivot friction errors. Two powerful micro magnets capped by jewels replace the pivot jewels, inducing a magnetic field in the balance staff. One more powerful than the other, the magnets effectively suspend the balance wheel, keeping it centered, its pivots merely touching the magnets’ jewel caps. Since the magnetic force far exceeds the force of gravity, frictional position errors are eliminated while overall friction is significantly reduced. The result is superb accuracy; an average rate performance of between -1 to +3 seconds per day easily beats the industry standard of -4 to +6 seconds. The watch, priced around $40,000 in rose or white gold, has collectors baying with excitement. Collector de Vries, an engineer at heart who loves Breguet’s focus on new technologies, purchased the Classique Chronométrie as soon as it was launched.

“When my grandfather took control of the brand in 1999, he had the vision to restore it to greatness by reviving its cultural and emotional dimensions,” says Hayek, 44. Following a similar path, the grandson has been busy acquiring original Breguet watches, displaying some 80 historic pieces in a museum at Breguet’s Place Vendôme boutique in Paris. Opened in 2000, the museum is headed by Emmanuel Breguet, the seventh-generation direct descendant of Abraham-Louis.

Smart move. Hayek is in effect buying in Breguet’s “shares outstanding,” and pushing the value of collectors’ stock further north. In 2012, for example, Breguet bought at auction a pocket watch, originally sold in 1814, for a record-breaking $4.25 million.

Today, Breguet offers five collections spanning ladies, classic dress, and the Type XX sport-watch lines, ranging in price from $17,800 to $734,000. Compared with the 4,000 watches made in 1999, a Bank Vontobel analyst today estimates 35,000 watches and sales of CHF720 million. Expect to see more cutting-edge materials in a new line of aviator watches, drawing on the brand’s aviation heritage. The firm’s biggest challenge, Hayek tells us, is to increase production to satisfy the brand’s growing demand—proof that the Swatch Group has Breguet well oiled and wound up.

(ZeroHedge) This May Just Be The Start Of The Oil Price War Says IEA

This May Just Be The Start Of The Oil Price War Says IEA

Saudi Oil Minister Ali al-Naimi may be one of the most powerful individuals in the global oil industry. After all, as the top oil official in arguably the world’s most influential oil-producing country, he has enormous influence.

But for all his power, is he the most ingenious? That question arises from the release of two reports on the current state of the oil industry that look at whether or not OPEC’s strategy of forcing US shale to cut back is succeeding.

The first, issued on May 12 by OPEC, says, in essence, that Saudi Arabia’s effort to keep its own oil production at near-record highs is succeeding in wresting market share back from US producers of shale oil, also called “light, tight oil” (LTO). The second, issued a day later by the International Energy Agency (IEA), agrees, but only up to a point.

“In the supposed standoff between OPEC and U.S. light tight oil (LTO), LTO appears to have blinked,” the IEA reported. “Following months of cost cutting and a 60 percent plunge in the U.S. rig count, the relentless rise in U.S. supply seems to be finally abating.”

But the report from the Paris-based IEA, which advises 29 industrialized countries on energy policy, also pointed to a rebound in oil prices that could benefit US shale producers.

As both the OPEC and IEA reports point out, the decline in US shale oil output has somewhat reduced the oil glut and led oil prices to rally up to about $65 per barrel. And the IEA adds that this brings LTO back above the threshold where its production becomes profitable again.

But that, evidently, isn’t good enough for both domestic and foreign shale drillers in the United States, and this is where ingenuity enters the picture. “Several large LTO producers have been boasting of achieving large reductions in production costs in recent weeks,” the report said.

For example, Statoil, Norway’s huge state-owned energy company, is trying out new techniques of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, in Texas’ Eagle Ford shale field. They include using different grades of sand to mix with water and chemicals, and drilling at varying depths, to increase oil yields.

“There’s a proverb in Norway that says necessity teaches the naked woman how to knit,” Bjorn Otto Sverdrup, a Statoil vice president, told The New York Times, during a tour of the company's shale operations in Kennedy, Texas.

Evidently this mother of invention is showing some success. Statoil may have cut the number of its rigs at Eagle Ford from three to two in 2014, but its production from the shale field is up by one-third. The new fracking method has also cut the cost of extraction from an average of $4.5 million per well to $3.5 million, in part because it’s been able to reduce drilling time from an average of 21 days to 17.

Against this backdrop, then, it’s not surprising that the IEA isn’t so sure that OPEC in general, and al-Naimi in particular, have the upper hand – yet. “It would thus be premature to suggest that OPEC has won the battle for market share,” the agency’s report said. “The battle, rather, has just started.”

NYT : Decoding the Enigma of Satoshi Nakamoto and the Birth of Bitcoin

Decoding the Enigma of Satoshi Nakamoto and the Birth of Bitcoin

It is one of the great mysteries of the digital age.

The hunt for Satoshi Nakamoto, the elusive creator of Bitcoin, has captivated even those who think the virtual currency is some sort of online Ponzi scheme. A legend has emerged from a jumble of facts: Someone using the name Satoshi Nakamoto released the software for Bitcoin in early 2009 and communicated with the nascent currency’s users via email — but never by phone or in person. Then, in 2011, just as the technology began to attract wider attention, the emails stopped. Suddenly, Satoshi was gone, but the stories grew larger.

While regulators debate the pros and cons of bitcoins, this volatile digital currency inspires the question: What makes money, money? By Channon Hodge, David Gillen, Kimberly Moy and Aaron Byrd on Publish Date November 24, 2013.
Many in the Bitcoin community told me that, in deference to the Bitcoin creator’s clear desire for privacy, they didn’t want to see the wizard unmasked. But even among those who said this, few could resist debating the clues the founder left behind. As I had these conversations with the programmers and entrepreneurs who are most deeply involved in Bitcoin, I encountered a quiet but widely held belief that much of the most convincing evidence pointed to a reclusive American man of Hungarian descent named Nick Szabo.

Mr. Szabo is nearly as much of a mystery as Satoshi. But in the course of my reporting I kept turning up new hints that drew me further into the chase, and I even stumbled into a rare encounter with Mr. Szabo at a private gathering of top Bitcoin programmers and entrepreneurs.

At that event, Mr. Szabo denied that he was Satoshi, as he has consistently in electronic communications, including in an email on Wednesday. But he acknowledged that his history left little question that he was among a small group of people who, over decades, working sometimes cooperatively and sometimes in competition, laid the foundation for Bitcoin and created many parts that later went into the virtual currency. Mr. Szabo’s most notable contribution was a Bitcoin predecessor known as bit gold that achieved many of the same goals using similar tools of advanced math and cryptography.

It may be impossible to prove Satoshi’s identity until the person or people behind Bitcoin’s curtain decide to come forward and prove ownership of Satoshi’s old electronic accounts. At this point, the creator’s identity is no longer important to Bitcoin’s future. Since Satoshi stopped contributing to the project in 2011, most of the open-source code has been rewritten by a group of programmers whose identities are known.

But Mr. Szabo’s story provides insight into often misunderstood elements of Bitcoin’s creation. The software was not a bolt out of the blue, as is sometimes assumed, but was instead built on the ideas of multiple people over several decades.

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This history is more than just a matter of curiosity. The software has come to be viewed in academic and financial circles as a significant computer science breakthrough that may reshape the way money looks and moves. Recently, banks like Goldman Sachs have taken the first steps toward embracing the technology.

Mr. Szabo himself has continued to be quietly involved in the work. In the beginning of 2014, Mr. Szabo joined Vaurum, a Bitcoin start-up based in Palo Alto, Calif., that was operating in stealth mode and that aimed to build a better Bitcoin exchange. After his arrival, Mr. Szabo helped reorient the company to take advantage of the Bitcoin software’s capability for so-called smart contracts, which enable self-executing financial transactions, according to people briefed on the company’s operations who spoke on condition of anonymity.

After Mr. Szabo led the company in a new direction, it was renamed Mirror, and it recently raised $12.5 million from several prominent venture capitalists, these people said. The company declined to comment for this article.

Mr. Szabo’s role at Vaurum has been kept a secret because of his desire for privacy, and he left in late 2014 after becoming nervous about public exposure, according to the people briefed on the company’s operations. While he was still there, though, the array of arcane skills and knowledge at his command led several colleagues to conclude that Mr. Szabo was most likely involved in the creation of Bitcoin, even if he didn’t do it all himself.

I met Mr. Szabo, a large bearded man, in March 2014 at a Bitcoin event at the Lake Tahoe vacation home of Dan Morehead, a former Goldman Sachs executive who now runs a Bitcoin-focused investment firm, Pantera Capital. Mr. Szabo worked for Vaurum at the time. Mr. Morehead and other hedge fund executives in attendance dressed in expensive loafers and slim-cut jeans; Mr. Szabo, his bald pate encircled by a ring of salt-and-pepper hair, wore beat-up black sneakers and an untucked striped shirt.

While he kept to himself, I managed to corner him in the kitchen during the cocktail hour. He was notably reserved and deflected questions about where he lived and had worked, but he bristled when I cited what was being said about him on the Internet — including that he was a law professor at George Washington University — and the notion that he had created Bitcoin.

“Well, I will say this, in the hope of setting the record straight,” he said acidly. “I’m not Satoshi, and I’m not a college professor. In fact, I never was a college professor.”

The conversation grew less heated when I asked about the origin of the many complicated pieces of code and cryptography that went into the Bitcoin software, and about the small number of people who would have had the expertise to put them together. Mr. Szabo mentioned bit gold, saying it harnessed many of the same obscure concepts, like secure property titles and digital time stamps, that made Bitcoin possible.

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“There are a whole bunch of parallels,” he told me. “I mean, the reason people tag me is because you can go through secure property titles and bit gold — there are so many parallels between that and Bitcoin that you can’t find anywhere else.”

When I asked if he believed that Satoshi had been familiar with his work, Mr. Szabo said he understood why there was so much speculation about his own role: “All I’m saying is, there are all these parallels, and it looks funny to me, and looks funny to a lot of other people.”

Dinner began, interrupting the conversation, and I never got another chance to talk to Mr. Szabo.

When I emailed him on Wednesday, he repeated his denial: “As I’ve stated many times before, all this speculation is flattering, but wrong — I am not Satoshi.”

Many concepts central to Bitcoin were developed in an online community known as the Cypherpunks, a loosely organized group of digital privacy activists. As part of their mission, they set out to create digital money that would be as anonymous as physical cash. Mr. Szabo was a member, and in 1993, he wrote a message to fellow Cypherpunks describing the diverse motivations of attendees at a group meeting that had just taken place. Some people, he wrote, “are libertarians who want government out of our lives, others are liberals fighting the N.S.A., others find it great fun to ding people in power with cool hacks.”

Mr. Szabo had a libertarian mind-set. He was drawn to those ideas partly, he told me, because of his father, who fought the communists in Hungary in the 1950s before coming to the United States, where Mr. Szabo was born 51 years ago. Reared in Washington State, Mr. Szabo studied computer science at the University of Washington.

Several experiments in digital cash circulated on the Cypherpunk lists in the 1990s. Adam Back, a British researcher, created one called hashcash that later became a central component of Bitcoin. Another, called b money, was designed by an intensely private computer engineer named Wei Dai.

When these experiments failed to take off, many Cypherpunks lost interest. But not Mr. Szabo. He worked for six months as a consultant for a company called DigiCash, he has written on his blog. In 1998, he sent the outline for his own version of digital money, which he called bit gold, to a small group that was still pursuing the project, including Mr. Dai and Hal Finney, a programmer based in Santa Barbara, Calif., who tried to create a working version of bit gold.

The concept behind bit gold was very similar to Bitcoin: It included a digital token that was scarce, like gold, and could be sent electronically without needing to pass through a central authority like a bank.

This history points to the important role that Mr. Szabo and several others played in developing the building blocks that went into Bitcoin. When Satoshi Nakamoto’s paper describing Bitcoin appeared in the fall of 2008, it cited Mr. Back’s hashcash. The first people Satoshi emailed privately were Mr. Back and Mr. Dai, both men have said. And Mr. Finney, who recently died, helped Satoshi improve the Bitcoin software in the fall of 2008, before it was publicly released, according to emails shared with me by Mr. Finney and his family.

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It is, though, Mr. Szabo’s activity in 2008, as Bitcoin emerged into the world, that has generated much of the suspicion about his role in the project. That spring, before anyone had ever heard of Satoshi Nakamoto or Bitcoin, Mr. Szabo revived his bit gold idea on his personal blog, and in an online conversation about creating a live version of the virtual currency, he asked his readers: “Anybody want to help me code one up?”

After Bitcoin appeared, Mr. Szabo changed the date on that blog post. It then looked as though it was written after Bitcoin’s release, rather than before, archived versions of the website show.

Mr. Szabo’s writing about bit gold from that time contains many striking parallels with Satoshi’s description of Bitcoin, including similar phrasings and even common writing mannerisms. In 2014, researchers at Aston University, in England, compared the writing of several people who have been suspected to be Satoshi and found that none matched up nearly as well as Mr. Szabo’s. The similarity was “uncanny,” said Jack Grieve, the lecturer who led the effort.

When I went back and read Mr. Szabo’s online writings, it was obvious that in the year before Satoshi appeared on the scene and released Bitcoin, Mr. Szabo was again thinking seriously about digital money.

He wrote frequently, over several months, about the concepts involved in digital money, including those smart contracts, a concept so specialized that Mr. Szabo is often given credit for inventing the term. Smart contracts later showed up as an essential piece of the Bitcoin software.

Mr. Szabo’s blog explained why he was examining these issues with such passion: The global financial crisis then underway suggested to him that the monetary system was broken and in need of replacement.

“For those who love our once and future freedoms, now is the time to strike,” Mr. Szabo wrote in an item on his blog in late 2007 endorsing the libertarian Ron Paul’s bid for the presidency, in part because of Mr. Paul’s views on the financial system.

For many Bitcoin watchers, just as notable as what Mr. Szabo wrote in that period was his silence once Bitcoin appeared in October 2008. After all, the virtual currency was an experiment in everything he had been writing about for years. Unlike Mr. Dai, Mr. Finney and Mr. Back, Mr. Szabo has not released any correspondence from Satoshi from this period or acknowledged communicating with him.

Mr. Szabo first made brief mention of Bitcoin on his blog in mid-2009, and in 2011, when the currency was still struggling to gain traction, he wrote about it again at greater length, noting the similarity between bit gold and Bitcoin. He acknowledged that few people would have had the expertise and the instinct to create either of them:

“Myself, Wei Dai and Hal Finney were the only people I know of who liked the idea (or in Dai’s case his related idea) enough to pursue it to any significant extent until Nakamoto (assuming Nakamoto is not really Finney or Dai).”

That item, in May 2011, was one of the last posts Mr. Szabo made before he went on a lengthy hiatus to work, he said later, on a new concept he called temporal programming.

May 2011 was also the last time Satoshi communicated privately with other Bitcoin contributors. In an email that month to Martti Malmi, one of the earliest participants, Satoshi wrote, “I’ve moved on to other things and probably won’t be around in the future.”

Whoever it is, the real Satoshi Nakamoto has many good reasons for wanting to stay anonymous. Perhaps the most obvious is potential danger. Sergio Demian Lerner, an Argentine researcher, has concluded that Satoshi Nakamoto most likely collected nearly a million Bitcoins during the system’s first year. Given that each Bitcoin is now worth about $240, the stash could be worth more than $200 million. That could make Satoshi a target.

With his modest clothes and unassuming manner, Mr. Szabo could be the kind of person who could have a fortune and not spend any of it — or even throw away the keys to the bank. People who know him say he drives a car from the 1990s.

That modest outward appearance hasn’t diminished the deference toward him among Bitcoin cognoscenti. Potential employees were drawn to Vaurum when they heard that Mr. Szabo worked there, people who interviewed at the company said. They wanted to work alongside the person they suspected could be Satoshi Nakamoto — or who at least participated in Bitcoin’s invention.

>>> ITV rumoured to be in sights of Comcast - FT

ITV rumoured to be in sights of Comcast 

Shares in ITV lifted amid speculation the London-based television broadcaster could be a takeover target for Comcast of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the Financial Times reported. The market report said a 1.8% boost to ITV’s share price followed the takeover chatter and post-results upgrades.

UK-listed ITV has a current market capitalisation of GBP 10.547bn (USD 16.584bn); Comcast, which owns NBCUniversal, has a USD 142.267bn market cap on the Nasdaq exchange.

The original article appeared in print; page 20.

Financial Times

(NY Post) Dan Loeb’s Third Point sells entire $1B share stake in Alibaba

Dan Loeb’s Third Point sells entire $1B share stake in Alibaba

Hedge fund heavyweights dumped their stakes in Alibaba during the first quarter after the Chinese e-commerce giant disappointed investors with a revenue miss just a few months after its blockbuster initial public offering.
Dan Loeb’s Third Point sold its entire $1 billion, 10-million share stake in Alibaba, while John Paulson dumped his 1.9 million shares by the end of the first quarter, according to quarterly filings of hedge funds’ stock holdings Friday.
Jamie Dinan’s York Capital sold 2.8 million shares, and PointState Capital, run by alums of Stanley Druckenmiller’s Duquesne Capital, sold 1.2 million shares, leaving it with 20,000.
Alibaba’s stock is down 15 percent this year after the revenue miss in January sparked a brutal sell-off. Still, some hedgies — Soros Fund Management, Tiger Global Management, Viking Global Investors and Moore Capital Management — took the opportunity to boost their stakes.

Pershing Square sold almost all of its shares of Actavis, which the hedge fund acquired when the drugmaker’s cash and stock merger with botox maker Allergan was completed in March. Ackman had only $401 million worth of Actavis stock at quarter’s end — about $5 billion less than Allergan’s value at year-end. The activist was unsuccessful in convincing Allergan to merge with Valeant, so he took the Allergan winnings and plowed them into Valeant, where he had a $3.9 million stake at the end of March.
Seth Klarman’s Baupost Group took a new stake in Pioneer Natural Resources, buying 3.16 million shares to make it one of the energy company’s top holders. Stanley Druckenmiller’s Duquesne family office also took a small a stake in Pioneer.
The company’s shares have been declining in recent weeks, following a take-down presentation by David Einhorn, which called it the “mother fracker” and predicted the entire industry was headed for trouble due to lower oil prices. Pioneer is up 4 percent this year, but still down 11 percent since Einhorn trashed it.
Leon Cooperman’s Omega Advisors has sold his 383,790 shares of Apple, a small position. Although Apple is up 17 percent this year, its Apple Pay system is a competitor to one being developed by Monetise, a favorite holding of Cooperman’s.
After energy stocks and Monetise pummeled Cooperman’s portfolio last year, he’s up 5.43 percent through April.
Einhorn, whose Greenlight Capital is down 2.2 percent for the year, pared his Apple stake by more than 1 million shares and dumped more than 15 million shares of Marvell Technology, a longtime holding. He took a new 9.5 million position in GM and a small stake in Bank of New York Mellon, which is the focus of activist pressure from Mick McGuire of Marcato Capital.
Paulson also took a $800 million stake in American International Group, which was also a new holding of Andreas Halvorsen’s Viking Global Investors.

(Barron's) Barron’s Best 100 Hedge Funds: 2015 List



Barron’s Best 100 Hedge Funds: 2015 List

Indexing may be in style, but old-fashioned stockpickers rule our list.

Equities dominated Barron’s Penta top 100 hedge fund rankings for the second straight year on the back of a record-breaking bull market now well into its seventh year. Once again, Larry Robbins’ Glenview Offshore Opportunity fund claimed the No. 1 spot, with an impressive three-year annualized gain of 57%.

Even with the recent gyrations in equity markets, stockpicker Robbins is bullish.

“The market continues to show favorable conditions, including valuations that remain attractive, excessive corporate cash balances, and underlevered balance sheets,” says Robbins. What’s more, he sees corporate executives and boards more open to share repurchases, capital improvements, and acquisitions.

Two other positives: Robbins expects the economy to grow at a solid rate and sees systemic risk ratcheted down by central bank and regulatory policies.


Larry Robbins, head of our No. 1 ranking hedge fund, Glenview Offshore Photo: Roger Hagadone for Barron’s

Accordingly, he continues to find opportunities, noting that 40% of his top 20 performers last year were new to his portfolio. For example, he established a 14% stake in the country’s largest operator of animal hospitals -- VCA (ticker: WOOF). He sees the industry as defensive, and the shares cheap at 14.5 times 2015 earnings, and expects top-line expansion of 5% to 6% for the business after several years of dormant growth following the financial crisis. VCA is now in the midst of a $400 million share buyback; the company is making more acquisitions, and the stock has soared from $32 to $53 since Robbins moved in just two quarters ago.

The stellar returns of Robbins and others on our Best 100 list stand out in a year when oil prices plummeted, the U.S. dollar surged, the Federal Reserve kept bond investors on edge, and the Cold War suddenly heated up in Ukraine. Such challenges proved difficult for many funds. Many high-caliber firms didn’t qualify for our list this year, including Ray Dalio’s Bridgewater Associates, David Einhorn’s Greenlight Capital, Chase Coleman’s Tiger Global, and Paul Singer’s Elliott Management.

Another measure of the challenging environment: the closure of some venerable fund names, including Dan Arbess’ Perella Weinberg Xerion fund, which had specialized in distressed credit and special situations, and Brevan Howard’s commodity fund. Several macro funds also shut down, including Josh Berkowitz’s Woodbine Capital Advisors, Keith Anderson’s Anderson Global Macro, and Kingsguard Advisors. And Everest Capital shuttered six of its seven funds after being smacked by the Swiss franc. Industry data analyst HFR reported that in all, 864 funds closed in 2014, a slight decrease from 904 the year before.

The Barron’s Penta survey underscores the great disparities in recent hedge fund performance, a source of controversy to investors who pay top dollar and pushed industry assets past the $3 trillion mark by at least one tally last year. According to BarclayHedge, the average hedge fund returned 7.36% annualized over the three years ended in 2014 (our benchmark); the average for our Best 100 exceeded 21%, net of fees, about a percentage point better the average return of the Standard & Poor's 500.


Brian Gonick and Richard Mashaal, managers of No. 2 Senvest Partners Photo: Gary Spector for Barron’s

The good news for investors is that the average hedge fund management fee declined to 1.51% from 1.54% last year, while performance fees dropped to 17.8% from 18.2%, says HFR.

Like Robbins, almost half of our best performers invested in stocks. Many are great long-term investors who don’t trade frequently, and others, such as Nelson Peltz’s Trian Partners (No. 87), William Ackman’s Pershing Square (No. 54), and Robbins, use their equity stakes to lobby for corporate changes.

Our No. 2 this year is a stockpicker, Richard Mashaal of Senvest Partners, who registered an annualized gain of 44% on the strength of selections like DepoMed(DEPO), which makes pain-management drugs; videogame maker Take-Two Interactive Software (TTWO), publisher of Grand Theft Auto; and Howard Hughes(HHC), a real estate developer whose portfolio includes the South Street Seaport in New York.

Michael Masters $768 million Marlin fund claimed the third spot by focusing primarily on long equity positions, registering three-year annualized returns of 41.63%.

The fourth-place finisher was Camox. Jonathan Herbert’s fund buys small- and mid-cap European stocks, which few expected to excel when 2014 got under way. “Europe is fundamentally stronger than it’s perceived,” explains Herbert, “and its growth engines -- German, Swiss, Austrian, Northern Italian, and Scandinavian global exporters -- are not only firing on most cylinders but many are now getting an added boost from the cheaper currency.” His winners: Temenos Group (TEMN.Switzerland), a global leader in banking software, and Duerr (DUE.Germany), a major provider of auto-plant engineering and paint systems. Camox scored an annualized three-year gain of 36%.

Credit continued its strong showing with more than a quarter of the Best 100 funds’ strategies focused on debt. Brendan McAllister, co-manager of Pine River Fixed Income, No. 51, said agency-backed residential mortgage-backed securities and commercial mortgage-backed securities were clearly the highlights in his fund’s modest 6% return in 2014. This year, he sees strong potential in structured credit. And he believes that the return of volatility to fixed-income markets, which he says was lacking last year, will enhance opportunities.


Jonathan Herbert of No. 4 Camox Photo: Chris Gloag for Barron’s

So how did Barron’s Penta identify these managers? We initially screen out narrow industries and small regions, excluding funds that invest in only one sector or country, and we avoid commodity-focused funds. We will include Asian-Pacific funds, for example, but not China-centric ones. Gold or energy funds are omitted, but diversified commodity trading advisors (aka, managed futures) are considered. And to ensure that we are reporting the results of professionally run shops that offer stability and sufficient liquidity, funds must have at least $300 million and a three-year track record as of Dec. 31, 2014.

Our search starts with information provided by three major hedge fund databases: BarclayHedge, Morningstar, and eVestment, which collectively sort through thousands of funds that meet our basic requirements. We also rely on a variety of industry contacts and proprietary sources to track down funds that operate below most radar screens. Funds are then arranged by three-year performance, with each contacted to confirm accuracy of data and strategy. This year’s reporting was assisted by Contributing Editor Michael Shari and Researcher Yue Jiang.

Noteworthy repeat performers on this year’s list include Michael Hintze’s CQS, Ken Griffin’s Citadel, and Steve Kuhn’s Pine River, each of which have made the list four times; David Tepper’s Appaloosa, claimed a spot for the fifth time.

Will hedged equity funds continue their strong performance? Despite the market’s being only up fractionally through the first quarter of the year, the trend in hedge funds is continuing with equity long-bias and long-short funds up 2.64% and 2.82%, respectively. Global macro has had the quickest start, up 3.79%, nearly matching its return for all of last year. Event driven is up 2.26%; fixed-income arbitrage has climbed 2.25%.

But to thrive for the rest of the year, managers will have to navigate the challenges posed by expanding interest-rate differentials, volatile exchange rates, and continued oil shocks -- which have so far been on the downside. But that could turn on a dime.

Camox’s Herbert, in fact, has turned defensive as his net long position has collapsed from last year’s 95% to 30% during the first quarter of 2015. His long book weight hasn’t changed, but he has ratcheted up his short exposure from 35% to 80%, having loaded up with shorts of the German DAX. But longer term, he remains bullish on Europe.

Senvest has similarly altered its portfolio. It’s maintaining its gross long weight, adding Fiat Chrysler as an ongoing restructuring story, and European financials and real estate investment trusts, including the Bank of Cyprus, Irish Green REIT (GRN.Ireland), Dalata Hotel Group (DHG.Ireland), and Spanish Axia Real Estate (AXIA.Spain). But it has boosted its gross shorts from 15% to 50%, including a bet against McDonalds. “We think its best days are behind it,” explains Mashaal, “and no financial engineering can alter the fundamental trends we see.”

With all of the macro rumblings, Michael Hintze, manager of CQS Directional Opportunities fund (No. 60), expects greater return differentiation among asset classes. Keeping his cards close to his vest, he does give a nod to biotech, robotics, and cybersecurity shares. He believes that the dollar will continue its rally, and with European quantitative easing now a reality, the Continent should offer opportunity. But he urges caution for the medium term, should European leaders further defer fundamental change.

Hintze’s multi-strategy approach keeps his options open. But with the persistence of cheap money, the lack of yield except in stock dividends, plummeting energy prices helping to keep a lid on inflation, and loose central-bank monetary policy, equity managers should be poised for another very decent year.