David Tepper, the head of Appaloosa Management and one of the most closely-watched people on Wall Street, went on an epic anti-Trump rant on CNBC, calling out the Republican presidential nominee for his lack of philanthropy, among other things.
“Trump masquerades as an angel of light,” the hedge fund manager asserted. “But he is the father of lies. Especially concerning charity and good deeds. Trump’s wife was on TV and she introduced him as a giving, generous and charitable person.” However, Tepper, whose firm was formerly based in New Jersey and is now headquartered in Miami, stressed that during the financial crisis and super storm Sandy, Trump, who had casinos and other properties in New Jersey, donated “not one dime, not one dime – and I know this first hand. This is a fact, not conjecture. Fact. Not one dime to one major food bank, one major pantry in Jersey.”
Tepper, whose political leanings are as eclectic as his portfolio, said in the interview that he plans to vote for Hillary Clinton but will vote Republican in other races. He earlier was supporting Republican Ohio Governor John Kasich.
“I’m not going to sit here and say Hillary Clinton is in any way shape or form a saint,” Tepper said in the CNBC interview. “Never going to say that or that she has great economic policies.”
Commenting on how, at a recent rally, Trump vocally reminded himself at the podium to stay on message, Tepper stated: “He talked [to] himself. The reason people are nervous about this guy, is he is going to get into the Oval Office and he is going to say, ‘Don’t press the button, Donald, don’t press that red button.’ It could be dangerous. I don’t want a guy that talks like that to himself.”
Meanwhile Tepper said he has become a little more bullish on the stock market — emphasis on “a little.” We have chronicled for about 1.5 years how Tepper has been very cautious on the stock market. However, appearing on CNBC, Tepper said that when the S&P 500 recently slipped to around 2,080, he “got long a little bit,” noting that he is a little longer the stock market than he was when he last appeared on the business network several weeks ago.
He has been, in part, concerned about how the markets would react to the elections. On Monday he predicted the S&P 500 will drop to 2,040 if Donald Trump wins but rise to 2,150 if Hillary Clinton wins, figuring the Democrats will capture the Senate but not the House of Representatives. However, he said the S&P 500 will climb to 2,180 if the Republicans also win the Senate. The benchmark closed at 2,131 on Monday.
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Marc Mezvinsky, Hillary Clinton’s son-in-law, drew on his connections to the Clinton family charitable foundation several years ago to help raise money for his new hedge fund, Eaglevale Partners, according to Politico, citing leaked documents released by WikiLeaks. According to the report, Mezvinsky invited prospective investors to a Clinton Foundation poker game. He also received fundraising help from Marc Lasry, the billionaire hedge fund and private equity manager and co-founder of Avenue Capital Management. Lasry is a long-time Clinton family friend who has helped raise money for Hillary Clinton and once employed her daughter, Chelsea Clinton.
The leaked documents include a memo and an e-mail written by ex-Clinton aide Doug Band and sent to a number of people connected to the Clinton family, including John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign chairman, and Cheryl Mills, her State Department chief of staff. The documents were hacked from Podesta’s Gmail account and made public by WikiLeaks in its latest document dump.
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Data tracker HFR’s HFRI Asset Weighted Composite Index gained 0.60 percent in October, led by large macro funds. It is up 1.32 percent for the year to date. The HFRI Fund Weighted Composite Index, on the other hand, fell 0.60 percent last month. However, it is still up 3.59 percent for the year. October was the fourth consecutive monthly gain for the asset-weighted index.
In its latest monthly report, HFR points out that the largest macro funds rose 1.3 percent last month while the equally-weighted macro index fell by 1.5 percent in October. “Falling investor risk tolerance drove gains at defensively-positioned, top hedge fund firms across Macro and Equity Hedge strategies in October,” points out HFR president Kenneth Heinz in a press release. The activist index fell nearly 2 percent last month but remains up 3 percent for the year.
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San Francisco-based ValueAct Capital Management bought about 6 million shares of CBRE Group, boosting its stake in the commercial real estate firm to 12.1 percent of the total outstanding. ValueAct, an activist firm headed by Jeffrey Ubben, did not make any suggestions to management or detail any plan. ValueAct partner Brandon Boze has sit on CBRE’s board since 2012.
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Elliott Management boosted its stake in Alcoa spinoff Arconic to 9 percent. The sometime-activist firm headed by Paul Singer did not articulate any plan for boosting the stock price.
