A response to a Freedom of Information request about Softbank’s trading activity has revealed that the Uber and Wework investor is under investigation.

On Wednesday, short seller research site PlainSite posted a letter from the Securities and Exchange Commission on Twitter revealing that the agency is investigating SoftBank, the Japanese telecommunications company and investing giant notorious for financing various unprofitable “technology” companies like WeWork, Uber, Compass, and Oyo.

Aaron Greenspan, founder of the Think Computer Foundation that runs Plainsite, filed a FOIA request in December 2020 for “any investigative materials [from January 1, 2018 to the present] pertaining to the various SoftBank companies controlled by Masayoshi Son, specifically relating to SoftBank’s trading of stocks and derivatives on those stocks.”

This request was filed in response to the revelation last fall that SoftBank was the “Nasdaq whale.”  SoftBank was responsible for stoking a huge rally in tech stocks, the Financial Times reported, because around August it began buying billions of dollars worth of call options in a shift for the company, fueling a rally that pushed up the share prices of tech companies it held billions of dollars of equity in.

Thanks in large part to a rally sparked by SoftBank’s high-risk market plays, firms like Tesla and Apple were up 74 and 21 percent, respectively, in the month of August alone. Executed through a small desk of traders and chief executive Masayoshi Son himself, the trading unit―named SB Northstar―and its bets won the company some $4 billion in gains at the beginning of September, before quickly melting away into nearly $3 billion in losses by the end of the month.

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(Bloomberg) — In the never-ending give and take between hedge funds and their investors, some managers are simply taking too much. Says who? Surprisingly, a hedge fund manager — one of the biggest, in fact.

“It’s really important that most of the alpha goes to the clients,” Luke Ellis, who oversees about $124 billion as chief executive officer of Man Group Plc, said in a Bloomberg “Front Row” interview. “The client is the one taking all the risk, and the client should get the majority of the rewards.”

His issue isn’t with the typical hedge fund. Indeed, Man has funds that still charge the classic “two and 20” — 2% of assets and 20% of investment profits in a given year. It also has products that cost a lot less, which explains why the company’s average fee in 2020 was 0.75%, or 75 cents on every $100 under management.

What irks Ellis are the expensive funds, many of them run by billionaires, that don’t target high enough volatility or, worse, lose money for clients. He won’t name them, of course, but some of the firms with funds meeting that description have included Bridgewater Associates, York Capital Management and BlackRock Inc.

The question isn’t whether a hedge fund should get paid to outperform, it’s how much. Ellis said that clients should keep two-thirds to three-quarters of every dollar of excess return, or alpha. Using his yardstick, a $10 billion fund with a two-and-20 fee structure would have to make a gross return of about $1.5 billion, or 15%, for the economics to be fair to all parties. Last year, the average hedge fund returned 9.5%.

Patrick and John Collison have got the luck of the Irish.

Stripe — the Irish brothers’ digital payments brainchild — has reportedly raised $600m at a $95B valuation, making it the most valuable private company ever to come out of Silicon Valley.

Here’s why: It’s the platform other platforms use to process money

Some 90% of US adults have bought from companies that use Stripe.

The company counts Amazon, Salesforce, Microsoft, Shopify, Uber, and Zoom among its customers — and at least 50 of these customers process $1B+ on Stripe annually.

In 2020, the company signed up 200k+ new European customers and handled 5k requests per second.

All this success is a boon for Ireland

Stripe plans to invest heavily in Europe and create 1k jobs at its Dublin HQ, a plus for a budding Irish startup community that saw total VC funding jump 13% in 2020.

CEO Patrick Collison, still just 32, was especially proud of a $50m investment in Stripe from Ireland’s National Treasury Management Agency.

But Stripe didn’t even need the funding…

… “It will just sit on the balance sheet” as a “rainy day fund,” according to Mike Moritz, partner at Sequoia and a Stripe board member.

Stripe, whose mission is to increase the GDP of the internet, sees a wide-open road ahead, with just 14% of commerce happening online today, up from 10% a year ago.

Stripe’s already done well at achieving that mission: The company has greater payment volume today than the entire ecommerce market when it was founded a decade ago.

Patrick and John, the next round of Guinness is on you.

Roblox, the kids gaming app that surged in popularity during the pandemic, soared in its market debut on the New York Stock Exchange on Wednesday. The company’s stock closed at $69.50 apiece, giving the company a market cap of $38.26 billion.

Roblox went public through a direct listing, following the lead of other tech companies including Spotify, Slack and Palantir. Instead of raising fresh capital in exchange for new shares, Roblox allowed existing shareholders to sell immediately, without being subject to a lockup period.

Shares began trading at $64.50, which represented a 43% increase from a private financing round in January, when the company sold shares for $45. The NYSE set a reference price on Tuesday of $45, though no stock changed hands at those levels. The reference price tends to reflect private market trading and does not indicate where a stock will open.

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