By Saeed Azhar and Manya Saini

NEW YORK (Reuters) -Goldman Sachs on Monday said it has struck a deal to sell part of its wealth business to an independent wealth manager, part of a strategy refresh which is seeing the bank exit some businesses and focus its wealth offering on targeting the super rich.

The Wall Street bank, which did not disclose the sale price, said the sale to Creative Planning LLC is expected to close in the fourth quarter and result in a gain.

The latest sale is part of a shift in strategy after CEO David Solomon reorganized the firm into three units last year and scaled back ambitions for its consumer business, which lost $3 billion in the last three years.

Goldman bought the registered investment adviser (RIA), formerly known as United Capital Financial Partners, for $750 million in 2019 when it managed about $25 billion in funds.

Creative Planning has more than 2,100 employees across its affiliates and $245 billion in combined assets under management and advisory.

The RIA business was relatively small in size compared with Goldman’s core business that focuses on the super rich.

Goldman’s private wealth arm oversees $1 trillion in assets for ultra-high net worth clients, who have $60 million or more in investable assets.

High net worth individuals – who would fall within the business Goldman is considering selling – typically have about $1 million to $10 million to invest

Marc Nachmann, Goldman Sachs global head of Asset & Wealth Management, told Reuters the current strategy is to invest more on its core businesses such as ultra-high net worth and workplace growth strategy including the proceeds from the sale.

“We think there’s a lot of space for us to grow. So we feel really good about it,” Nachmann said, adding these plans are without a potential acquisition.

The bank can serve high net worth investors through RIA and other wealth management clients, such as Creative Planning, Goldman said.

Earlier in July, Creative Planning announced it had entered into a strategic custody relationship with Goldman’s advisor solutions platform, which serves independent advisors.

Shares of Goldman Sachs were up 1.8% in afternoon trade.

“This transaction is consistent with Goldman’s ongoing efforts to streamline core segments and de-emphasize legacy consumer-centric businesses,” said Daniel Fannon, banking analyst at Jefferies, in note.

“Within wealth, GS can now focus exclusively on growth of the workplace and premier UHNW (ultra high net worth) advice channels, while also supporting private banking and lending revenues.”

Goldman Sachs & Co LLC is serving as financial advisor and Weil, Gotshal & Manages LLP is serving as legal counsel to Goldman Sachs.

Goldman is also pushing ahead with a sale of its fintech business, GreenSky, and has also offloaded the bulk of its unsecured consumer loans after it halted this kind of lending last year.

(Reporting by Saeed Azhar in New York and Manya Saini in BengaluruEditing by Marguerita Choy and Megan Davies)

By Nell Mackenzie and Carolina Mandl

LONDON/NEW YORK (Reuters) – Hedge funds hold record exposure to the seven biggest tech stocks by market capitalization, according to data released on Friday by Goldman Sachs, in a week Nvidia hit an all-time high after beating revenue expectations.

The largest seven U.S. stocks collectively now make up about 20% of the total net market value held by hedge funds tracked by Goldman Sachs. They have also been instrumental in the gains in the broader U.S. equity market this year.

Microsoft , Apple, Alphabet, Meta, Amazon, Nvidia and Tesla saw the biggest percent of single stock exposure as of Aug. 24, meaning the positions were trades in the individual stocks, not just in the indices like the Nasdaq.

“Hedge funds continue to embrace mega cap tech and the artificial intelligence theme,” Goldman Sachs’ prime brokerage said in a note sent to a restricted group of clients and obtained by Reuters. The investment bank did not immediately comment on the note.

The companies did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Last week, Nvidia reported record quarterly revenue fueled by strong demand for its artificial intelligence (AI)-focused chips and said the AI boom has legs.

“We essentially have had two markets: the ‘Magnificent Seven’ and all the rest of equities. Hedge funds will be forced into capturing these returns regardless of analysis,” said Jim Neumann, chief investment officer of Sussex Partners.

“It is momentum on steroids,” he said, adding that stock-picking hedge funds might find it harder to outperform investments in other asset classes, like fixed income.

Goldman Sachs, which runs one of Wall Street’s largest prime brokerages, is able to track trends in flows.

Shares in these companies have all risen over 35% this year, with performances ranging from Apple’s 38% rise to Nvidia’s 211% jump.

“The primary objective of hedge funds is to generate returns, rather than to be imaginative for the sake of diversification,” said Bruno Schneller, managing director at INVICO Asset Management.

Given the stocks’ outperformance, it makes sense to have invested in them, Schneller said.

Daniel Loeb, the CEO of Third Point – which had around $12.6 billion in assets under management at the end of February – said earlier in August that his top five winners in 2023 had included Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet.

HFR’s long/short index, which tracks the performance of stock-trading hedge funds that buy and sell stocks, was up about 7% for the year through July, according to the data company’s website.

(Reporting by Nell Mackenzie and Carolina Mandl; Editing by Sharon Singleton and Paul Simao)

By Jonathan Stempel

NEW YORK (Reuters) – A Los Angeles media company that billed itself as potentially “the next Disney” will pay $6.1 million to settle U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission charges it illegally raised nearly $30 million by conducting unregistered sales of non-fungible tokens.

Monday’s settlement with Impact Theory LLC was the SEC’s first enforcement action involving NFTs, digital assets that reflect ownership of files such as artwork, images and videos and are recorded on a blockchain.

The SEC said Impact Theory marketed its Founder’s Keys–sold in “Legendary,” “Heroic” and “Relentless” tiers–as a means to profit from its business by investing at an early stage.

Impact Theory allegedly raised $29.9 million by selling 13,921 Founder’s Keys in late 2021, and received $978,000 of royalties from secondary sales.

The settlement calls for Impact Theory to pay a $500,000 fine, give up $5.6 million including interest, and destroy all Founder’s Keys in its possession.

In its marketing, Impact Theory allegedly likened its NFTs to an investment in Walt Disney before introducing Mickey Mouse in the 1928 short film “Steamboat Willie,” and said it was “trying to build the next Disney.”

The SEC said Impact Theory also compared its NFTs with “handing ($20) to Mark Zuckerberg in his dorm room,” referring to the billionaire Facebook co-founder.

Failing to register deprives investors of “the robust disclosures and other safeguards long provided by our securities laws,” said Antonia Apps, director of the SEC’s New York office.

Impact Theory said it was pleased to settle, though “disappointed” at the SEC’s viewing digital assets “through the lens of the securities laws.”

SEC commissioners Hester Peirce and Mark Uyeda partially dissented from Monday’s settlement, saying the regulator owed investors better guidance on NFTs.

“We do not routinely bring enforcement actions against people that sell watches, paintings, or collectibles along with vague promises to build the brand and thus increase the resale value of those tangible items,” Peirce and Uyeda wrote.

On Aug. 22, Nathaniel Chastain, a former product manager at the world’s largest NFT marketplace OpenSea, was sentenced in Manhattan to three months in jail in the first insider trading case involving digital assets.

(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by David Gregorio)

(Reuters) -Shares of Vietnamese electric-vehicle maker Vinfast surged 21% on Monday, extending a rally from last week that more than quadrupled its market value to $160 billion.

The company made a blowout debut on Wall Street this month and has quickly grown in valuation to become the third-most valuable automaker – only behind Tesla and Toyota.

But Vinfast’s small amount of publicly available shares has made the stock prone to volatility, with shares jumping or slumping more than 14% in 11 of the past 12 sessions.

The stock was on track to add nearly $33.6 billion to its market capitalization, based on a share price of $83.33.

Vinfast’s shares were among the most actively watched on Stocktwits, a popular website with retail investors.

Vinfast is almost entirely controlled by Pham Nhat Vuong, Vietnam’s richest man and founder of parent conglomerate Vingroup, with a stake of about 99.7%, according to a filing.

Despite the market enthusiasm, Vinfast faces a long road before it can start competing meaningfully with Tesla and legacy automakers that are pouring billions of dollars to grab a share of the EV market.

Only 137 Vinfast EVs were registered in the United States through June, according to S&P Global Mobility.

The firm is also entering the U.S. and European markets at a time when EV demand is slowing and Tesla has waged a price war to defend its dominance.

Vinfast expects to sell as many as 50,000 electric vehicles this year, compared with Tesla’s projection to deliver 1.8 million cars.

To drive sales, Vinfast is breaking away from the direct-to-consumer approach used by Tesla and turning to dealers. The company is also building a $4 billion factory in North Carolina.

(Reporting by Akash Sriram in Bengaluru; Editing by Devika Syamnath)

(Reuters) -The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has suspended its challenge of Amgen’s $27.8 billion purchase of Horizon Therapeutics, allowing the FTC to consider whether the agency should settle the case, a filing late on Friday showed.

The pause is effective until Sept. 18.

Amgen said the company was aware of the move and is prepared to demonstrate that there is no legal or factual reason to prohibit the acquisition to the courts.

“We would be pleased if our commitment were honored instead of going through a lengthy court process,” the company said in a statement adding that it anticipates closing the acquisition by mid- December this year.

The FTC filed a lawsuit on May 16 aimed at stopping the transaction in a rare move to block a large pharmaceutical deal.

The agency had said it opposed the deal because of concern that Amgen would leverage its big selling drugs to pressure insurance companies and pharmacy benefit managers to give favorable terms for Horizon’s two key products – the fast-growing thyroid eye disease treatment Tepezza and gout drug Krystexxa.

The Thousand Oaks, California-based company announced plans to buy Horizon in December last year, saying that its rare disease drugs would offer it some protection from the drug pricing provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act, which are aimed at drugs most widely used by the government’s Medicare health plan.

The agency and Amgen are due to meet over the injunction in Chicago federal court in September.

Horizon Therapeutics did not immediately respond to a Reuters’ request for comment.

(Reporting by Urvi Dugar in Bengaluru; editing by Jason Neely and Diane Craft)

By Luc Cohen

NEW YORK (Reuters) -Sam Bankman-Fried has appealed a decision to jail him for alleged witness tampering ahead of his Oct. 3 trial over the collapse of his FTX cryptocurrency exchange.

In a filing late on Friday night with the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Bankman-Fried’s lawyers said the 31-year-old former billionaire simply exercised his First Amendment rights by sharing writings by his former colleague and romantic partner Caroline Ellison with a New York Times reporter.

Ellison is one of three former members of Bankman-Fried’s inner circle expected to testify against him after pleading guilty to fraud. Bankman-Fried’s lawyers said he shared her writings to defend his reputation, not to intimidate her.

“It is unclear how a cooperating witness who has promised to testify against a defendant could be meaningfully threatened by nothing but their own statements being published by a reputable newspaper,” Bankman-Fried’s lawyers wrote.

In her writings, which predated FTX’s November 2022 collapse, Ellison described feeling “unhappy and overwhelmed” with her job and “hurt/rejected” from her breakup with Bankman-Fried.

Prosecutors said Bankman-Fried released those writings to harass Ellison and to dissuade others from testifying if they thought he would make them look bad in the press.

U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan in Manhattan revoked Bankman-Fried’s bail on Aug. 11, finding probable cause to support a witness tampering charge.

Prosecutors have accused Bankman-Fried of stealing billions of dollars in FTX customer funds to plug losses at Alameda Research, a crypto-focused hedge fund he also owned and where Ellison was chief executive.

He has pleaded not guilty.

In their appeal, Bankman-Fried’s lawyers also said their client’s lack of computer access at Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center has prevented him from being able to analyze the government’s evidence and prepare properly for trial.

Though Bankman-Fried has been allowed to meet with his lawyers twice a week, for six hours at a time, at the Manhattan federal courthouse, his lawyers have said he needs more time, and asked that either he be released temporarily or that they be permitted to meet five days a week.

The defense has also said the Brooklyn jail has failed to provide Bankman-Fried with Adderall for his attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or serve him vegan food, causing him to subsist on bread, water and peanut butter.

(Reporting by Luc Cohen in New YorkEditing by Daniel Wallis, Nick Zieminski and Matthew Lewis)

By Daniel Wiessner

(Reuters) – A U.S. appeals court has revived claims that McDonald’s Corp violated federal antitrust law by requiring franchisees to agree not to hire away each other’s employees.

The 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago on Friday said the judge who dismissed the proposed nationwide class action last year failed to properly analyze the so-called “no-poaching” agreements.

The judge had found that the agreements were valid because they protected franchisees’ investments in training workers.

But the 7th Circuit on Friday said the judge must look more closely at whether the agreements needed to cover the entire country and last for six months after workers left their jobs.

Circuit Judge Frank Easterbrook wrote that those questions “can’t be answered by observing that any given franchise contract, viewed by itself, expands the output of food.”

McDonald’s and lawyers for the plaintiffs did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Monday.

Two former McDonald’s workers were appealing a 2022 ruling by U.S. District Judge Jorge Alonso in Chicago dismissing claims the agreements stifled competition and depressed their wages.

The agreements barred franchisees from hiring people who worked at other franchises or corporate stores anywhere in the United States for six months after they left their jobs.

McDonald’s in court filings has said it stopped requiring franchisees to sign no-poach agreements in 2017. Several other major fast-food companies have taken the same step in recent years in response to probes by states.

The plaintiffs were backed in their appeal by the Biden administration and the Democratic attorneys general of 20 states and Washington, D.C., who said in court briefs that McDonald’s agreements illegally suppressed workers’ wages.

The 7th Circuit on Friday also said the district court judge should rethink his ruling declining to certify a nationwide class in the lawsuit. McDonald’s has said the class could include millions of workers.

(Reporting by Daniel Wiessner in Albany, New York; Editing by Mark Potter)