Fiszel’s Honeycomb Hedge Fund Down 4% in 2021: Hedge Fund Update

Hema Parmar and Nishant Kumar

(Bloomberg) -- So much for a calm 2021. January kicked off with chaotic markets as Reddit-inspired retail investors banded together to spark a rally in beleaguered stocks that were among the most-shorted in hedge fund land.

Now, details of the damage are coming in. Melvin Capital Management took the biggest known hit thus far, sinking 53% after its aggressive and leveraged short on GameStop Corp. Maplelane Capital fell 45% through Jan. 27, Bloomberg previously reported. Other funds have been dragged down by the resulting broader market havoc.

Meanwhile, the S&P 500 fell 1.1% last month.

Key Developments:

Fiszel’s Honeycomb fell 4% in JanuaryRenaissance’s RIEF fund slumped 9.5% last month

Fiszel’s Honeycomb Hedge Fund Fell 4% Last Month

David Fiszel’s $1.2 billion Honeycomb Asset Management lost about 4% last month, according to people with knowledge of the matter. That follows a gain of 58% for the Master Fund in 2020.

The fund wagers on and against stocks and also makes select private investments. Honeycomb has discussed with investors launching a long-only fund this year, the people said.

A spokeswoman for New York-based Honeycomb, which was founded in 2016, declined to comment.

Renaissance Quant Fund Slumps 9.5% (10:36 a.m. NY)

A Renaissance Technologies stock fund slumped in January, adding to the quant-investment giant’s woes after it suffered heavy losses in pandemic-hit markets.

The Renaissance Institutional Equities Fund fell 9.5% in the month, according to people with knowledge of the matter, who asked not to be identified because the information is private. That follows a 20% loss last year for the fund, which is the largest of three that the firm sells to outside investors.

A spokesman for the East Setauket, New York-based firm founded by billionaire mathematician Jim Simons declined to comment.

The setback for one of the industry’s best-known hedge fund firms underscores the continued troubles for quant firms. Their trading models were thrown off by market swings as Covid-19 battered the global economy and central banks unleashed unprecedented stimulus to contain the carnage.

Renaissance, which oversees $60 billion, has dropped out of a ranking of the world’s 20 most profitable hedge fund firms after some of its public funds fell more than 30% last year. It’s not clear what caused the Institutional Equities Fund’s January loss, which compares with a 1% drop in the S&P 500 index.

Read more: Short Sellers Face End of an Era as Rookies Rule Wall Street

Renaissance is best known for its Medallion fund, which is only open to employees and has annualized gains of roughly 40% over the past three decades. While Medallion employs a short-term trading strategy, the Institutional Equities Fund tends to hold its stock positions for weeks or months, trades only U.S.-listed shares and is biased toward stocks its models expect to rise.

For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com

Subscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.

©2021 Bloomberg L.P.

Latest Stories

  • Eric Trump reportedly wagered Election Day that his father would win 320 electoral votes

    Former President Donald Trump and those closest to him believed before Election Day that he would win a second term, "their views swayed by the assurances of pro-Trump pundits and the unscientific measure of the size and excitement of the president's rally crowds," The New York Times reports. Trump had laid the groundwork for a Plan B, arguing that he lost only because of a vast conspiracy of fraud, but he and his close circle didn't think he would need it, the Times reports: Flying home on Air Force One from the final campaign event in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in the early hours of Nov. 3., Mr. Trump's son Eric proposed an Electoral College betting pool. He wagered that the president would win at least 320 electoral votes, according to a person present for the exchange. "We're just trying to get to 270," an adviser more grounded in polling and analytics replied. [The New York Times] The Times did not report how much Eric Trump bet or whether he ever paid up. But watching returns come in on election night, Donald Trump "fell into enraged disbelief as his lead inexorably dissipated, even in formerly red states like Arizona," the Times reports. "Eric Trump goaded him on — a dynamic that would play out in the weeks to come." Read more about Trump's post-election machinations at The New York Times. More stories from theweek.comThe Jan. 6 rally that fed the deadly Capitol siege was reportedly a Trump White House productionRise of the Barstool conservativesTrump appointees aggressively lobbied against giving states COVID-19 vaccine rollout funds

  • Thousands of Navalny supporters rally across Russia despite fierce crackdown

    Thousands are rallying across Russia as nationwide protests in support of jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny continue to grow. For the second straight weekend, Russians took to the streets on Sunday in the Far East and Siberia as Moscow geared up for the rally with a strict security lockdown. Defying minus 20 degrees temperatures, more than 6,000 people marched across Russia’s third-largest city of Novosibirsk on Sunday, chanting “Down with the czar!” after riot police sealed off the main square. In Vladivostok on the Pacific Ocean, police pushed the crowds on the frozen Amur Bay where officers chased protesters in the snow. More than 500 arrests were reported across the country by Sunday morning.

  • Israeli army kills alleged Palestinian attacker in West Bank

    An Israeli soldier on Sunday shot dead a Palestinian suspected of attempting an attack on troops in the West Bank, the Israeli army said. The army said in a statement that “an armed assailant with three knives connected to a stick” attempted to attack soldiers at a West Bank junction south of Bethlehem. No soldiers were hurt.

  • Taiwan says Chinese fighters, U.S. aircraft both entered defence zone

    Six Chinese fighter aircraft and a U.S. reconnaissance aircraft entered the southwestern corner of Taiwan's air defence identification zone on Sunday, the island's defence ministry said, in an unusual admission of U.S. military activity. Tensions have spiked over the last week or so after Taiwan reported multiple Chinese fighters and bombers flying into the zone last weekend, in an area close to the Taiwan-controlled Pratas Islands in the northern part of the South China Sea.

  • ‘Trash’ that washed up on Texas beach isn’t garbage at all, officials say. What is it?

    “I see this all the time ... and never knew what it was!”

  • Here's a side-by-side comparison of GOP, Biden coronavirus relief bills

    The details of the COVID-19 relief package proposed by Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and nine other Republican senators as a counter to President Biden's plan are out. The bill would cost a total of $618 billion, far below Biden's $1.9 trillion proposal. The two do find common ground on COVID-19 containment efforts like vaccine distribution and testing — both would allocate $160 billion in that category. But, there's not a lot of overlap elsewhere. The GOP package contains direct stimulus checks, but they begin at $1,000 per individual and begin phasing out for people who earn $40,000 per year with a cap at $50,000. The Biden plan, meanwhile, would provide $1,400 that begin phasing out at $75,000 per year with a $115,000 cap for individuals and $206,000 for couples. The GOP bill would also extend enhanced unemployment insurance through June at $300 per week, compared to Biden's $400 per week, which would last through September. Funds for school reopening, rental and landlord support, and state and local government aid are other areas that are either diminished or cut entirely from the GOP plan. $618b GOP plan / $1.9T Biden plan pic.twitter.com/zUOpzn01rR — Igor Bobic (@igorbobic) February 1, 2021 Biden has agreed to sit down with the senators behind the bill, but earlier reports indicated Democratic lawmakers don't believe it's worth entertaining, so the meeting may just be a formality. 10 Senate Republicans offer covid-relief package less than one-third the size of Biden’s - including nothing for core Democratic priority of state/local govt aid Biden responds by inviting them to the WH today this looks less like negotiation than a polite exchange of gestures — John Harwood (@JohnJHarwood) February 1, 2021 More stories from theweek.comEric Trump reportedly wagered Election Day that his father would win 320 electoral votesThe Jan. 6 rally that fed the deadly Capitol siege was reportedly a Trump White House productionRise of the Barstool conservatives

  • Biden redirecting Trump's $30 billion fund used for farmers impacted by trade war

    The Biden administration wants to use the Agriculture Department money to tackle climate change, support restaurants and kickstart other programs without waiting for Congress; Fox Business Network's Charles Payne reacts.

  • Drone video shows major damage after chunk of iconic California highway washes into ocean

    Part of Highway 1 in the Big Sur area collapsed after heavy rains and slid into the Pacific.

  • Iran state TV airs launch of new satellite-carrying rocket

    Iranian state TV on Monday aired the launch of the country's newest satellite-carrying rocket, which it said was able to reach a height of 500 kilometers (310 miles). The rocket, named Zuljanah for the horse of Imam Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, did not launch a satellite into orbit. The satellite carrier is 25.5 meters (84 feet) long and weighs 52 tons.

  • COVAX to send AstraZeneca shot to Latin America, some states to get Pfizer too

    The COVAX global vaccine sharing scheme expects to deliver 35.3 million doses of AstraZeneca's COVID-19 vaccine to 36 Caribbean and Latin American states from mid-February to the end of June, the World Health Organization's regional office said. The Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) said the Americas region needed to immunise about 500 million people to control the pandemic. It said WHO would complete its review in a few days of the AstraZeneca vaccine for emergency use listing (EUL).

  • Georgia Republicans Launch ‘Stop Stacey’ to Counter Abrams’ 2022 Organizing

    Republicans in Georgia have had just about enough of Stacey Abrams it seems. The Democratic activist and media darling has been lauded by liberal leaders for helping President Joe Biden turn Georgia blue in November and following that up by electing two left-wing U.S. senators in January, giving Democrats control of all elected levers of power in Washington D.C. On Monday, a group of Republican strategists in Georgia and elsewhere announced the formation of Stop Stacy, which they describe as a “national, grassroots organization of engaged conservatives” that will “stand up to the left and prevent a complete left-wing takeover of Georgia – and America – in 2022.” According to a menacing video on the website StopStacy.org, the group’s intent is to: “Stop higher taxes. Stop government healthcare takeover. Stop the assault on election integrity. Stop the radical left. Stop the new DC swamp. Stop Stacey Abrams.” Biden has said that “nobody in America has done more” to help Democrats in 2020. “Stacey Abrams is trying to claim total control of America – which is why it’s so critical for Republicans across Georgia and across the country to have a dedicated, well-funded outside organization to stop her,” according to a Stop Stacy press release. The existence of the new organization, and its seeming focus on a single un-elected activist, shows how concerned Republicans are about Abrams’ efforts heading into 2022. After losing her race for Governor to Republican Brian Kemp in 2018 (though she didn’t concede, claiming the election was stolen from Georgia voters), Abrams’ Fair Fight political action committee raised about $95 million dollars from 550,000 donors to benefit Democratic candidates. Abrams’ New Georgia Project, a voter registration group, claims to have registered “over 500,000 Georgians and counting,” according to its website. That group is under investigation by Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger for allegations that it and other groups aggressively attempted to register ineligible, out-of-state and deceased voters. “I have issued clear warnings several times to groups and individuals working to undermine the integrity of elections in Georgia through false and fraudulent registrations,” Raffensperger said in an early-December news release. New Georgia Project leaders have called the allegations nonsense. Georgia has a lot at stake next year. Abrams is expected to make another run for governor against Kemp, who has been attacked by former President Donald Trump for not doing enough to overturn the November election. Republicans also will have a shot to unseat Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock, who won a special election in January.

  • Trump appointees aggressively lobbied against giving states COVID-19 vaccine rollout funds

    As states were formulating plans to vaccinate their residents against COVID-19 last fall, top Trump administration officials pushed Congress to deny the state governments any extra funding for the vaccine rollout, Stat News reported Sunday. The officials, including Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar and White House Office of Management and Budget chief Russ Vought, disregarded "frantic warnings from state officials that they didn't have the money they needed to ramp up a massive vaccination operation," focusing instead on $200 million the states had not yet spent, Stat reports. Vought was "obsessed" with the fact that states hadn't already spent the allocated by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a Republican Senate aide told Stat, adding that even staunch fiscal conservatives in Congress knew states needed more than $200 million to inoculate 300 million Americans. But "much of the lobbying push came from Paul Mango, the former deputy chief of staff for policy at the Department of Health and Human Services," Stat reports, citing a Democratic congressional aide and Mango himself. "A lot of them had shut down their economies and they weren't getting tax revenue," Mango told Stat. "I'm sure they could use money — that's not in dispute — what's in dispute is whether they needed money given all they hadn't used to actually administer vaccines." The National Governors Association and the Association for State and Territorial Health Officials (ASTHO) both warned the Trump administration last fall that more funding was needed to prepare for the soon-to-be-approved vaccines, and former CDC Director Robert Redfield had asked Congress for $6 billion for the states' efforts. Mango told Stat that Redfield was "lobbying Congress for money behind our back" to "help their friends at the state public health offices." State health departments note they were not vaccinating anyone in October and said they were drawing down sources of money that were set to expire before tapping the $200 million, especially because it wasn't certain Congress would allocate anymore. Congress did approve $4.5 billion in December, but the funds didn't start arriving in states until January. Read more about the lobbying effort, what effect it may have had on the slow rollout, and the schism between the Trump political appointees and public health officials at Stat News. More stories from theweek.comEric Trump reportedly wagered Election Day that his father would win 320 electoral votesThe Jan. 6 rally that fed the deadly Capitol siege was reportedly a Trump White House productionRise of the Barstool conservatives

  • Nine top New York health officials quit amid Cuomo undercutting expert advice, report says

    Health officials told The New York Times that morale was at an ‘all-time low’ in the state’s Health Department

  • Mexico confirms at least 2 Guatemalan migrants among 19 dead

    Prosecutors in northern Mexico confirmed Saturday that at least two of the 19 people found shot to death and burned near the U.S. border were Guatemalan migrants. The forensic results confirmed the fears of families in a rural Indigenous farming community in Guatemala who have said they lost contact with 13 migrants last week as they travelled toward the United States. The bodies were found Jan. 22 piled in a burned-out truck on a dirt road in the northern border state of Tamaulipas.

  • Two million Australians in lockdown after one coronavirus case found

    About 2 million Australians begun their first full day of a strict coronavirus lockdown on Monday following the discovery of one case in the community in Perth, capital of Western Australia state, but no new cases have since been found. Authorities ordered a five-day lockdown of Perth after a security guard at a hotel used to quarantine people returning from overseas was found to have contracted the virus. The state government said 66 people have been deemed close contacts of the unidentified guard and none of those already tested were infected.

  • France and Germany mull sanctions on vaccine providers as EU row over delays escalates

    France and Germany threatened legal action against AstraZeneca on Sunday as they scrambled to explain their shortages in vaccine supplies and warned that any firm which favoured UK orders for the jabs would be penalised. Clement Beaune, the French Europe minister, threatened sanctions against the Anglo-Swedish firm, which produces the Oxford vaccine, if it emerged that Britain had been given priority. "If there is a problem and that other countries have been favoured - for example the UK over us - then we will defend our interests," Mr Beaune said on Sunday. "Contracts are not moral commitments, they are legal commitments. Penalties or sanctions can be triggered in every contract." It came as Berlin and Rome issued similar threats to vaccine providers, in the latest stage of a bitter row in Europe over delays in the production and delivery of Covid jabs. "If we find out that individual companies are not maintaining their side of the bargain then we'll have to make a decision on legal measures," Peter Altmaier, the German economy minister, told Die Welt newspaper. Mr Altmaier, a close confidant of Chancellor Angela Merkel, also warned vaccine producers that "it is in no way acceptable that another country is retrospectively favoured over the EU." AstraZeneca says it will deliver 4.6 million doses to France by the end of March, which is half the amount that was initially agreed upon. It has also significantly reduced its delivery targets for the EU for the first quarter of the year, leading to a furious response from Brussels, which accuses the company of offering preferential treatment to the UK. Among the sanctions being considered by France include withholding payments, cancelling subsequent orders and seeking compensation for a breach of contract. Mr Beaune said an investigation into vaccine deliveries to Britain by EU-based factories was already underway. As the third wave of coronavirus spreads across the continent, Emmanuel Macron, the French president, is resisting calls to impose a third lockdown and has instead tightened existing restrictions. "When you're French, you have everything you need to succeed providing you dare to try," he is said to have told ministers on Friday, though the refusal to declare a full lockdown went against his own scientific advisers' recommendations. Polish police launched tear gas and stun grenades over the weekend as they shut down illegal discos and parties in the cities of Wroclaw and Rybnik. As in other European cities, some businesses have opened for trade in defiance of the rules while protests over Covid restrictions have broken out in the Netherlands, Spain, France and Denmark. Dutch police arrested at least 30 people in Amsterdam on Sunday as they struggled to prevent a fresh outbreak of anti-lockdown rioting. Thousands of protesters also took to the streets of Vienna over the weekend, taking part in an anti-lockdown demonstration organised by a far-Right group. Similar scenes unfolded in Hungary where a group of 100 restaurants said they would reopen despite facing threats of heavy government fines. It also emerged over the weekend that Boris Johnson forced the EU into making two u-turns on vaccines after Brussels tried to prevent doses in a Belgian factory from reaching the UK, and moved to impose a hard border in Northern Ireland for the same purpose. During two phone calls with Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, Mr Johnson is said to have persuaded the EU chief to abandon both proposals, the Mail on Sunday reported. Micheál Martin, the taoiseach (Irish prime minister), told the BBC on Sunday that they were "blindsided" by the EU threat to seal off the frontier. "The problem is the commission took the wrong mechanism in revoking Article 16 of the protocol to deal with it," he said, adding that there were "a lot of lessons to be learned" over vaccine supplies. On Sunday night, Ms von der Leyen announced on Twitter that the EU would ramp up vaccine supplies this week. "[AstraZeneca] will deliver 9 million additional doses in the first quarter (40 million in total) compared to last week’s offer & will start deliveries one week earlier than scheduled. The company will also expand its manufacturing capacity in Europe," she wrote.

  • White House allies secretly wrote the Texas lawsuit asking the Supreme Court to overturn Biden's win

    By Nov. 12, former President Donald Trump's team of election lawyers knew he had lost his re-election bid, that despite Trump's tweets and public comments, "there was no substantial evidence of election fraud, and there were nowhere near enough 'irregularities' to reverse the outcome in the courts," The New York Times reports. But their protestations just made Trump turn to allies telling him what he wanted to hear, so Nov. 12 was also the day "Trump's flimsy, long-shot legal effort to reverse his loss turned into something else entirely — an extralegal campaign to subvert the election, rooted in a lie so convincing to some of his most devoted followers that it made the deadly Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol almost inevitable." Trump's experienced legal team either quietly faded away or was sidelined by Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, Lin Wood, and other lawyers "ready to push forward with propagandistic suits that skated the lines of legal ethics and reason," the Times reports. That eventually included "the vast majority of Republican attorneys general, whose dead-on-arrival Supreme Court lawsuit seeking to discard 20 million votes was secretly drafted by lawyers close to the White House." Before Thanksgiving, Trump's allies — including Kris Kobach, a voting restrictions activist who previously led Trump's "election integrity" commission; former North Carolina Supreme Court Chief Justice Mark Martin; and Lawrence Joseph, a lawyer who had worked to shield Trump's tax returns — started working on a new lawsuit that while "short on legal or factual merit" was "rich in the sort of sensational claims" sure to spread across conservative media, the Times reports. The argument was that Trump states could ask the Supreme Court to throw out 20 million votes in certain states President Biden won because, they claimed, those Biden states effectively cheated. "Only one type of lawyer can take a case filed by one state against another directly to the Supreme Court: a state attorney general," the Times reports. "The president's original election lawyers doubted that any attorney general would be willing to do so," but Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton jumped at the chance. When the Texas solicitor general refused to be involved in the suit, Paxton hired Joseph as a special outside counsel, not disclosing to the court that Joseph and other outside Trump advisers had written the brief. Read more about Trump's extralegal campaign at The New York Times. More stories from theweek.comEric Trump reportedly wagered Election Day that his father would win 320 electoral votesThe Jan. 6 rally that fed the deadly Capitol siege was reportedly a Trump White House productionRise of the Barstool conservatives

  • Jared Kushner nominated for Nobel Peace Prize

    318 people were put forward for award in 2020

  • Thousands flee Hong Kong for UK, fearing China crackdown

    Thousands of Hong Kongers have already made the sometimes painful decision to leave behind their hometown and move to Britain since Beijing imposed a strict national security law on the Chinese territory last summer. Others say China’s encroachment on their way of life and civil liberties has become unbearable, and they want to seek a better future for their children abroad. The moves are expected to accelerate now that 5 million Hong Kongers are eligible to apply for visas to Britain, allowing them to live, work and study there and eventually apply to become British citizens.

  • Pope institutes Catholic day to honour the elderly

    Pope Francis on Sunday instituted a "World day for Grandparents and the Elderly" in the Roman Catholic Church to be marked once a year to honour them and to underscore their importance to society. Francis, making the surprise announcement at his Sunday noon address, said it would be marked on the fourth Sunday of July each year in Catholic communities around the world. The Catholic Church already has a World Day of Peace, which Pope Paul instituted in 1967, a World Day of Youth, which Pope John Paul II established in 1984, and a World Day of the Poor, which Francis started in 2017.