Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Too Smart? A Hedge Fund's Complex Scheme May Cost It Millions


According to the NY Times hedge funds are supposed to be the smart money, but sometimes even they can be outsmarted.  Take the case of Mason Capital Management and the Telus Corporation, a large Canadian telecommunications company. Mason Capital, a New York and London hedge fund with about $8 billion in assets under management, has made a complex bet in Telus stock that looked shrewd at first, but that may now lose tens of millions of dollars.

Telus has two classes of shares, one that is voting and trades only in Canada and another that is nonvoting and trades in Canada and the United States. The nonvoting shares traditionally trade at a discount to the voting shares, but Telus is proposing to convert the shares on a one-for-one basis, giving a windfall to the holders of nonvoting shares.

Mason has taken a complex trading position in opposition to the proposal. In April, the hedge fund announced that it had acquired 19 percent of Telus’s voting stock, worth 1.9 billion Canadian dollars, or $1.8 billion….

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