After-Hours Bandits Mug GLG

The world’s grubbiest major hedge fund manager oozed under the door of the New York Stock Exchange Monday, and, despite the financial sector thumpage and dippage, didn’t have a bad day: It traded 2.3 million shares, and closed up 6.6 percent at $14.60, after a first print at $13.70. This achievement was somewhat tarnished when, for reasons not entirely obvious at the moment, it spat up most of that after-hours, with the last trade—according to the not always entirely reliable Yahoo! Finance—at $13.84.

London-based GLG, which now runs $23 billion and is a long-standing member of the global hedge fund super-league, has the unique charm of having been the first hedge fund to cop to a regulatory trifecta in the UK, France and the US, where it whined that it wasn’t aware of the rule it broke at the time of its infraction.

So it’s entirely appropriate that it chose to enter the U.S. capital markets by the back-door, getting a leg-up through the unlocked SPAC window from Freedom Acquisition Holdings Corp. (FRH). That company’s stock, then listed on the The World’s Most Unnecessary Stock Exchange, magically ran up eight percent, on 10 times its average daily volume, late on the Friday afternoon before the GLG listing plan was announced on a Sunday in late June. No word yet from the alleged cops on the insider trading beat but, then again, that sort of informed trading almost certainly falls under the Amex business-as-usual exemption.

Several other things:

• GLG’s website is at www.glgpartners.com; however getting to its investor relations area requires clicking through a bunch of warnings and disclaimers, before reaching nirvana.
• Curiously, after it went to all that trouble to get a US listing, a press release last week announced that its board has “approved a warrant and stock repurchasing plan, authorizing GLG to repurchase up to a total of $100 million”—or slightly more than 10 percent of its market cap—“of warrants and stock over the next six months.”
• More curiously still, that information does not appear to have been considered worthy of an SEC filing, or certainly of an SEC filing linked to the GLG investor relation pages. (Which raises a whole other issue that is probably not GLG’s fault: EDGAR, when queried for the GLG trading symbol, is still throwing up Glamis Gold filings; it was acquired by Goldcorp in late 2006).
• Earlier on NakedShorts:

GLG style: A backdoor, and funny trades
Jun. 25 2007

Oh, sure ya didn’t (GLG Edition)
Jun. 28 2007