3 Things That Could Move Financial Stocks Today
NEW YORK (
) -- The big names in the investing business are out with their 13F quarterly filings, which reveals the stocks they bought and sold in the last quarter. Among the notable disclosures that affect financial stocks, hedge fund titan John Paulson of Paulson & Co is pushing for a spinoff at
Hartford Financial
(HIG) - Get Report
in a rare activist investor move.
Paulson holds an 8.4% stake in the company. In a letter Tuesday, the investor argued that the company should separate its property and casualty insurance business from its life insurance business. Hartford's management said in the last conference call that there were significant challenges to a spinoff, but Paulson said that the issues were "overrated."
"Shareholders are entitled to expect the management and the board to show leadership by moving beyond the current phase of identifying potential challenges to working actively to address them," he wrote in a letter.
Hartford climbed 7% in afterhours trading.
Jim Chanos' Kynikos Associates opened a new position in
JPMorgan Chase
(JPM) - Get Report
of 145,000 shares. TPG-Axon Capital Management added 2.6 million shares in the bank.
Capital Growth Management, run by Kenneth Heebner, hiked its stake in financials by 7.2 percentage points to 49% of assets. Heebner bought 22.1 million shares in
Bank of America
(BAC) - Get Report
, even as he sold all 406,000 shares in
Apple
(AAPL) - Get Report
.
The
Federal Reserve
approved
Capital One Financial's
(COF) - Get Report
takeover of ING Groep's U.S. online banking unit, shrugging off protests from consumer groups that said the merger would create another "too big to fail bank."
A rejection of the deal would have had big implications for deal activity in the banking space as it would prevent large banks from aggressively pursuing takeovers as a path to growth. Large regional banks such as Capital One have thus far escaped the "systemically important" tag and been free to pursue acquisitions.
The approval will allow Capital One to move ahead with its planned acquisition of HSBC's credit card operations.
A technology analyst with
Goldman Sachs
(GS) - Get Report
is under investigation for passing inside information to hedge funds about the supply chain for personal-computer parts makers from Taiwan, according to the
Wall Street Journal
.
Citing sources close to the investigation, the
Journal
says that analyst Henry King is the target of the investigation by the Manhattan U.S. attorney's office and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Representatives from Goldman Sachs and Federal authorities declined comment, the article states.
The is not the first time in recent memory that Goldman Sachs has been caught up in an insider trading scandal. Last year former Goldman Sachs director Rajat Gupta was accused of passing insider information to Raj Rajaratnam, the co-founder of Galleon Group.
-- Written by Shanthi Bharatwaj in New York.
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