Brief : Bridgewater Associates LP plans to offer employees flexibility as they return to work for the first time since the Covid-19 pandemic began, according to Co-Chief Investment Officer Bob Prince. The firm expects to move toward a blended approach with some staff spending fewer days in the office and offering opportunities for employees to exercise more flexibility, Prince said Thursday in an interview on Bloomberg TV. The Westport, Connecticut-based hedge fund’s current plan is to have everyone in the office one day a week and smaller groups a second day, according to Deputy Chief Executive Officer Nir Bar Dea. The plan will start after Labor Day. The decision is a departure for the firm, which is known for an unorthodox culture that prizes employees working intensely together. Founder Ray Dalio runs the industry giant following a set of about 200 principles, the most central of which is “radical transparency” -- a demand that employees be brutally honest with one another. All meetings are taped and archived for future study and discussion. Prince said having staff work from home has been mixed. “Ironically, in some ways, we’ve been more productive in the last year than we ever were, in other ways less,” he said. “Obviously the culture of a community is very hard to build when you’re not actually seeing each other.”
Brief: Brookfield Asset Management Inc. said it reached a US$6.5 billion agreement to acquire the shares of Brookfield Property Partners LP it doesn’t already own, boosting its offer to take private its real estate arm. The Canadian alternative-asset manager said Thursday it plans to acquire the minority stake for US$18.17 per unit. That would mark a 10 per cent increase to the US$16.50 a unit Brookfield Asset offered in January, and a 26 per cent premium over where the shares traded prior to that earlier proposal. Brookfield Property’s board has unanimously approved the deal, according to the statement by the companies. Brookfield Property dropped 0.8 per cent to US$17.66 as of 10:44 a.m. in New York. Brookfield Property Partners owns, operates and develops one of the largest portfolios of real estate in the world. At the end of December it had about US$88 billion in total assets, including developments such as London’s Canary Wharf and Brookfield Place in New York. In 2018, Brookfield Property acquired GGP Inc., the second-largest mall operator in the U.S., for about US$15 billion. The pandemic has taken a toll on the company as widespread stay-at-home orders kept workers from offices and shoppers from malls. Brookfield Property Partners reported a US$2 billion loss and its shares fell 21 per cent last year.
Brief: Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) activity surged globally in the first quarter of 2021 to a year-to-date record, as companies and investment firms rushed to get ahead of changes in how people work, shop, trade and receive healthcare during the COVID-19 pandemic. While the number of deals was up only 6% from a year ago, the total value of pending and completed deals rose 93% to $1.3 trillion, the second-biggest quarter on record, according to data provider Refinitiv. Dealmakers said a boom in the stock market and low borrowing costs - driven by the Federal Reserve’s loose monetary policies - emboldened companies, private equity funds and blank-check acquisition firms to pursue their dream deals. This is despite the global economy’s failure to have fully recovered as yet from the virus’ financial fallout. “This is as robust and broad-based an M&A market as I have witnessed in the last 20 years,” said Colin Ryan, co-head of Americas M&A at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. “We are in an environment where assets are scarcer than the available capital right now.”
Brief: Hedge funds are “cautiously optimistic” on their growth prospects for the coming year, according to a new deep-dive industry study jointly published by the Alternative Investment Management Association, Simmons & Simmons and Seward & Kissel. ‘The Global Hedge Fund Benchmark Survey: Beyond the Horizon’ probed manager performance, investor sentiment, future challenges, and alignment of interests, among other things. The wide-ranging study is part of an ongoing research series into the health of the hedge fund industry conducted by AIMA, the global trade body for the hedge fund and alternative asset management industry, together with law firms Simmons & Simmons and Seward & Kissel. Its key findings suggest 2021 will see a further acceleration of trends, with the industry becomingly increasingly digitalised and more social conscious, and hedge fund firms playing an integral role in the global economic recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic.
Brief: India seems to have recovered quickly from Covid, and most citizens have been able to go back to their normal lives free from lockdown restrictions, says Jupiter's Avinash Vazirani. The country has reported just 12 deaths per 100,000 population, a much lower figure than, for example, the UK's 189 per 100,000. More than 30 million people in India have been vaccinated so far, with the government hoping to cover the most vulnerable 250 million by the end of July. India is especially well-placed for Covid vaccinations, as the country manufactures around 60% of the world's supply of vaccines. We think that India's world class healthcare and pharmaceutical industry will be a beneficiary of long-term trends for the treatment of and vaccination against Covid. Our outlook is also positive for India's economic growth in general. Economic activity has been trending above pre-Covid levels since January, with Goods & Services Tax (GST) takings up 8% in January, on a year-on-year basis, to a record high. According to the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce & Industry (FICCI) business confidence in March is at a decadal high, with companies not only seeing a recovery in demand, but also the potential for higher investment over the coming quarters.
Brief: Over a year into the pandemic, institutional investors are worried about the mental health of their employees. Managing stress and curbing burnout among employees who are working remotely were cited as top concerns in Nuveen’s inaugural global survey of institutional investors, which was released Wednesday. Nuveen, the investment manager of TIAA, has $1.2 trillion in assets under management and operates in 27 countries, according to a press release on the survey results. The asset manager surveyed 700 global investors and consultants including decision-makers at corporate and public pensions, insurance companies, endowments and foundations, superannuation funds, sovereign wealth funds, central banks, and consultants. The organizations represented in the survey held assets ranging from more than $10 billion to no less than $500 million, Nuveen said. When the Covid-19 pandemic changed the nature of work and shifted the investing world to the home office, institutional investors took the change in stride.