Hedge funds hunt for Robinhood replacement — TIAA buyouts — Merrill Lynch's FA training head is out

Subscribe now and access premium content View online       Insider Finance         Happy Saturday! Hedge funds that love to use Robinhood data to hunt for winning ideas won't be able to tap its enormous pool of trades in quite the same way anymore. As CNBC first reported, Robinhood is no longer publishing how many customers held a particular stock, and the retail-trading app is also limiting access to its API. And as Dakin Campbell and Dan DeFrancesco learned, hedge funds were pinging other data providers within hours of hearing the Robinhood news to try to line something else up.  Read the full story here: Steve Cohen's Point72 and other hedge funds are sending urgent requests to find a replacement after Robinhood data on hot stock trades suddenly went dark What does it take for vendors to win customers over on a data feed that's not quite so high on their list of priorities? Dan teamed up with Bradley Saacks to ask gatekeepers at top alt-data consumers what they look for in a pitch. You can read all their responses here: How to pitch Bridgewater, Balyasny, and other big names on buying new data sets, according to 7 people in charge of their strategies Goldman Sachs is among bidders for GM's credit-card business, the Wall Street Journal reported this week, a move that could mark another big push into consumer finance for the firm. Meanwhile, Goldman and other banks have been going all in on creating their own internal content machines in a bid to win customers — and the general public — over. Dakin Campbell and Rebecca Ungarino took a look at who's driving that push and how work-from-home has taken those efforts to the next level. Read the full story here:  Wall Street banks like Goldman Sachs have been building out their own in-house media organizations to help control their image. Now they're kicking production into overdrive. More big headlines from this week below, including pay drama at PwC, how in-person client schmoozing is making a comeback, and the latest on what's going on inside Merrill Lynch's financial-adviser trainee program after an unusual pause on client outreach.  If you're not yet a subscriber to our finance newsletters, you can sign up here. Have a great weekend,  Meredith  The head of Merrill Lynch's financial adviser training program, the firm's main talent pipeline, is leaving The head of Merrill Lynch's financial adviser training program is leaving after a year and a half in the role, industry news website AdvisorHub first reported on Friday. Jennifer MacPhee's successor, who the firm will name in the coming weeks, will have to contend with a shifting adviser training and recruitment landscape in an aging industry trying to attract new blood. Bank of America's wealth manager recently prohibited its financial advisers in-training from reaching out to prospective new clients. And as Rebecca Ungarino reported earlier this week, the reason for Merrill Lynch's temporary pause was "many" outreach-related violations across the organization. A former PwC partner just sued the firm for $15 million in compensation, offering a rare look at pay and wrangling over clients at a Big 4 firm As Jack Newsham reports, a new lawsuit is packed full of details about compensation and how partners get credit for business they bring in at PwC — including a copy of a PwC offer letter that was attached to the complaint.  Wall Street is taking clients for long walks on the beach and out to dinner outdoors in the Hamptons as safe schmoozing picks up Offices may still be largely empty, but Wall Street is upping its game when it comes to entertaining clients. Dinners in Manhattan are back on — but not everyone is thrilled about sitting on a city sidewalk in the summer heat. Those looking for an alternative can try golf, beach walks, or dining al fresco in the Hamptons. Bradley Saacks, Meghan Morris, and Rebecca Ungarino have all the details  Investment manager TIAA is shrinking headcount with buyouts offering up to 2 years of pay. Now 10% of its workers are cashing out. Investment manager TIAA's voluntary employee buyout program was so successful that the company now says it can avoid layoffs through 2021. Meghan Morris laid out how the buyout offer played out and which areas of the firm saw the most uptake. TIAA's asset-management arm, Nuveen, saw lower participation in the program than the overall company. WeWork nabbed a fresh $1.1 billion in financing from SoftBank as the coworking giant's membership dropped WeWork saw its membership number fall in the second quarter, but the coworking giant continued to add locations and nabbed a fresh $1.1 billion from lead investor SoftBank. Meghan Morris rounded up details on revenue and the firm's latest take on how a multi-year turnaround plan is playing out. Investments in risky hotel debt could get wiped out as travel gets slammed — and one group of lenders may see an outsized hit South Korean lenders poured billions of dollars into US commercial real-estate acquisitions in recent years, including hotel properties that have been battered in recent months by the pandemic. Dan Geiger explains what drove the investment spree and what's next for the firms.  Equifax's CTO walked us through a Google Cloud migration that's addressing security concerns, cutting $240 million in costs, and helping speed up product launches Dan DeFrancesco chatted with Bryson Koehler, the chief technology officer of Equifax, who detailed the digital transformation the consumer credit-reporting giant has undergone over the past two years. Koehler shared that Equifax has put a significant amount of a $1.25 billion investment toward full adoption of the public cloud, already decommissioned 10 data centers, and is on pace to save $240 million. On the move $34 billion Citadel poached a rising star from billionaire Lee Ainslie's Maverick Capital to join its Ashler stock-picking unit. Deutsche Bank has poached a senior trader from HSBC to bolster its distressed-credit business, a powerhouse group that's been hit with defections in 2020. Careers Students are weighing the pros and cons of virtual law school. Here's why some are deferring, and what that means for job prospects. How people of color can identify mentors on Wall Street and progress their careers, according to a Black JPMorgan VP Private equity Private-equity fundraising hit a 2-year low in Q2 as coronavirus wreaked havoc with businesses and travel. We spoke to experts about why the drop is a 'pause, rather than a wholesale change.' Private-equity giants like Carlyle are inking more deals in Asia. Here are the areas where they see the most investing opportunity. Real estate Neighbor, an Andreessen Horowitz-backed startup that wants to be the Airbnb of self-storage, is partnering with landlords to turn empty offices into spaces for people's stuff A student-housing developer is facing backlash after pressuring schools to bring college kids back to campus so it could keep its revenues up Real estate giant CBRE has an 'unparalleled' amount of data. Its tech chief lays out how it's putting it to good use. Massive office landlord Vornado is planning to install face-reading cameras to track tenants in the bulk of its huge portfolio SL Green is moving to foreclose on a building on NYC's glitzy Fifth Avenue shopping corridor, highlighting a dismal outlook for commercial real-estate Payments and fintech A fintech that helps Twitch, Showtime, and CBS manage their subscriptions is eyeing international growth after nabbing a big investment from Accel-KKR TD Ameritrade's growth accelerator just launched an app for college debt as its first startup. Execs at the brokerage giant explain why it's a key tool to build entirely new businesses. A Y Combinator-backed payments startup that's raised $16 million just launched out of stealth mode. Here's a look at how it's plugging into accounting software like Quickbooks to help companies manage bills. PayPal-backed rewards app Dosh is eyeing 150 million new customers through partnerships with Venmo and other fintechs as it taps into the booming cash-back industry Hedge funds Dan Loeb lays out why $13 billion Third Point is loading up on Disney stock and calls the streaming business an opportunity of a lifetime Data scientists and engineers are leaving Amazon and Facebook for hedge funds. Here are the firms that are winning the battle for top tech talent. Asset management Here's who's most at risk once asset managers ramp up layoffs as the pandemic pressures the already-squeezed industry           Was this email forwarded to you? 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