market folly

Thomas Steyer's hedge fund firm Farallon Capital Management has filed an amended 13D on Global Gold (GBGD) and they now show an 11.3% ownership stake in the company. The filing was made due to activity on May 26th, 2009 and they own 4,466,456 shares. This is a decrease in the amount of shares they've previously owned and they attached numerous details of sales in their filing. They were selling in excess of 119,000 shares on May 26th and 27th, as well as June 2nd. They sold at the prices of $0.11 and $0.09, with the bulk of their sales coming at $0.11. While we haven't covered Farallon's entire portfolio in our hedge fund tracking series, we will note that they have much fewer positions than in the past.

And, this is obviously due to the fact that Farallon saw a big decrease in assets under management (AUM) for 2008. In fact, they narrowly escaped being on the top 10 asset losers list. Yet, despite losing so many assets, Farallon still managed to land themselves on the #10 spot in Alpha's 2009 hedge fund rankings, where they tied Jim Simons' Renaissance Technologies.

Steyer founded the firm in 1986 and still manages it today. He graduated from Summa Cum Laude from Yale University and received his MBA from Stanford's Graduate School of Business. Prior to founding Farallon, Steyer worked as an analyst in Morgan Stanley's Mergers & Acquisitions department and then as an associate in the risk arbitrage department of Goldman Sachs. Being so well versed in the area of risk arbitrage, Steyer employs similar strategies at Farallon. Farallon invests in both public and private debt, equities, private investments, and real estate. In terms of more recent activity, we had noted in early February that Farallon had sold out of numerous positions (via 13D and 13G filings). Additionally, Farallon updated their positions in Freightcar America (RAIL) and Capitalsource (CSE). Those movements of course reflect the decrease in assets under management.

Taken from Google Finance, Global Gold is "a development stage Company. The Company is engaged in exploration for, development, and mining of gold, silver and other minerals in Armenia, Canada and Chile. In Armenia, the Company's focus is primarily on the exploration, development and production of gold at the Tukhmanuk property in the North Central Armenian Belt."

(This is yet another post that was supposed to be published many days ago, but was lost in the shuffle of our site problems. Again, we apologize).