market folly

Hedge fund firm D.E. Shaw & Co recently filed a Form 4 with the SEC that we wanted to update you on. D.E. Shaw & Co was selling Owens Corning (OC) shares on May 6th, 7th, and 8th. They sold at the prices of $18.4592, $19.7434, $16.3648, $17.6882, and $16.3806. The bulk of their sales were made at $18.xx and $16.xx. In total, Shaw sold 2,207,313 shares over those three days. As per the SEC filing, they now hold 10,887,829 shares after all their selling. You can also view D.E. Shaw's portfolio from Q4 2008 if you're curious as to what else they hold. As always, we'll continue to monitor their movements and will update their long equity portfolio in our hedge fund tracking series in a week or so.

D.E. Shaw & Co was founded in 1988 by David E. Shaw and manages around $33 billion as of December 1st 2008. They focus on intertwining technology and finance and are a hedge fund, private equity firm, and technology development shop all in one. In Alpha's hedge fund rankings, D.E. Shaw is ranked 6th in the world. Taken from their website, they invest “in a wide range of companies and financial instruments within both the major industrialized nations and a number of emerging markets. Its activities range from the deployment of investment strategies based on either mathematical models or human expertise to the acquisition of existing companies and the financing or development of new ones.”

Shaw himself oversees strategic maneuvers at the firm, but no longer is active in the day to day operations. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford University. Shaw also was recently seen on Forbes' billionaire list, as well as the list for Top 25 highest paid hedge fund managers for 2008. They employ mainly quantitative strategies and do a lot of statistical arbitrage. As such, we need to add a disclaimer to this article. We're merely presenting what they've filed with the SEC. Since they are primarily a quant firm, we don't know the rhyme or reason behind their moves.

Some notable former employees include Jeff Bezos (before founding Amazon.com) and Lawrence Summers, who left the firm to serve on President Elect Obama’s economic team. Shaw has had a decent year thus far, seeing their Composite fund +0.8% for March and sitting at +5.59% year to date (through 3/31/09) as detailed in our March hedge fund performance numbers update. In terms of other activity, we touched on their SEC filing on Orient- Express Hotels (OEH) back in January (which is an ongoing saga). Lastly, for those of you potentially interested in working at such an outfit, check out some of Shaw's past interview questions.

Taken from Google Finance,

Owens Corning is "a producer of glass fiber reinforcements and other materials for composites and of residential and commercial building materials. The Company operates within two product categories: composites, which include the Composite Solutions segment and building materials, which includes its insulating systems, roofing and asphalt and other building materials and services reportable segments."