Ex-NBA veteran point guard Sebastian Telfair was arrested on several charges early Sunday in Brooklyn, according to police. Telfair and one other individual, 18-year-old Jami Thomas, were pulled over by police and face charges related to illegal possession of guns, ammunition, and marijuana.
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From Jonathan Dienst and Ida Siegal of NBC New York:
Telfair, 32, and another man, Jami Thomas, 18, were found with three loaded firearms, a semi-automatic rifle, ammunition and a bullet-resistant vest, police said. Two bags of marijuana and a burning marijuana cigarette were also allegedly found in the 2017 Ford F-150 pickup with Florida plates.
They were parked illegally on the median on Atlantic Avenue near Classon Street, said police.
As officers approached, they started to drive off, according to the source. Police who pulled them over smelled marijuana and saw a lit “blunt” on the dashboard, police said. […]
Telfair and a friend were arrested in 2007 on a gun charge after a traffic stop. He was stopped for speeding on the Bronx River Parkway, then found to be driving with a suspended license. Police found a .45 caliber handgun under the passenger seat. Both Telfair and his friend said they didn’t know how the gun got there.
Telfair pleaded guilty in 2008 to criminal possession of a weapon and was sentenced to three years of probation. The NBA suspended him for three games.
Myles Miller of New York’s PIX11 News tweeted out a police photo of the contraband:
Telfair has not played in the NBA since a brief tour with the Oklahoma City Thunder in 2014, but his fame will always outpace his career accomplishments. Telfair gained considerable attention at Brooklyn’s Lincoln High School, where he added to his cousin Stephon Marbury’s legacy as a star point guard. He was one of the top players in the prep class of 2004 and skipped college to join the Portland Trail Blazers as the No. 13 pick in the draft. However, his game never developed and he spent his 10 NBA seasons as a journeyman. In all, Telfair played 564 games for nine teams, including two stints with the Minnesota Timberwolves.
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Telfair most recently played in the Chinese Basketball Association with the Fujian Sturgeons. The CBA’s season finished in April, at which point Telfair returned to the United States.
We will update this story as more information becomes available.
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Eric Freeman is a writer for Ball Don’t Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at efreeman_ysports@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!
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The Tony Awards: From Scarlett to Bette, What Everyone Wore
Donna Freydkin 8 hours ago
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Scarlett Johansson in Michael Kors
The actress showed just the right amount of leg. (Photo: Getty Images)
The Tony Awards celebrate the theater world’s best performances and biggest pipes. And there were no clear-cut frontrunners this year, after that phenomenon known as Hamilton swept the major categories in 2016 — the closest being the beloved and buzzy Dear Evan Hansen. But regardless of who takes home a statue, get ready for serious style moments from luminaries like Bette Midler and Olivia Wilde. Break a leg, folks.
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Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest for nonstop inspiration delivered fresh to your feed, every day. For Twitter updates, follow @YahooStyle and @YahooBeauty.
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AFP
China Eastern plane makes emergency landing in Australia
Glenda KWEK,AFP 53 minutes ago
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A China Eastern passenger plane has made an emergency landing in Sydney after a huge hole appeared in one of its engine casings and forced it to turn back just after taking off.
Terrified passengers described a very loud noise soon after flight MU736 left Sydney Airport for Shanghai at 8.30pm (1030 GMT) on Sunday.
Crew cleared seats near the affected engine and turned the flight back. No one aboard the twin-engine Airbus A330 was injured.
China Eastern said the crew found damage in the casing of the air inlet in the left engine.
"The crew... decided to return to Sydney Airport immediately," an airline spokeswoman added in an emailed statement to AFP.
"The returned aircraft is currently under investigation at Sydney Airport."
Images posted on social media showed a large hole ripped in the casing.
An unidentified passenger told broadcaster Channel Seven: "We, like, went up in the air and all of a sudden, I heard like 'z-z-z-z-z' and it was really, really loud. It kind of smelled like burning.
"Oh, I was scared. Yes. I was really scared. Our group was terrified."
Another passenger told Channel Nine that "the wing to my left just started making a massive amount of noise and they cleared all of the seats".
- Panel detached? -
AirlineRatings.com editor Geoffrey Thomas said investigators would be looking at whether the acoustic panelling of the engine had become detached, citing a similar incident in mid-May involving an Egypt Air A330.
He said the panel might have come back and been sucked into the engine.
Thomas said an Airbus airworthiness directive issued in 2011 and updated in 2014 noted that some operators had found acoustic panelling in the cowling area was disbonding.
"It was a problem that they knew about and airlines had been warned and had been required to inspect their engines and if necessary replace the panels," he added.
"Whoever is looking after the maintenance of the engines, whether it is the airline or the engine maker, it's their responsibility."
He said the China Eastern incident was unusual and the serious damage to the engine meant it was likely to be replaced.
But despite the dramatic scenes, Thomas said the damage was not as severe as the engine failure experienced by Qantas Singapore-Sydney flight QF32 in 2010 due to a separate problem, which led the Australian carrier to ground all its A380s.
The robustness of today's engines also meant twin-engine jets could continue taking off -- when they were under the most stress -- even if there was a failure of one of them, he said.
"Engines today are so reliable that in fact some twin-engine aeroplanes are certified to fly up to 330 minutes flying time away from an alternate airport," Thomas said.
China Eastern said all passengers would be placed on flights departing Australia Monday.
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Why high-cost money managers aren't worried about the passive investing boom
Julia La Roche 17 hours ago
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Former NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg thinks active management will have its day again
It’s a mistake for investors to dismiss the entire hedge fund industry because it has underperformed the stock market in recent years. There’ll come a time when the market won’t be so kind to those invested in low-cost, passively-managed index funds. And when that time comes, what appears to be exorbitant fees charged by fund managers will seem totally justified.
This conclusion was one of the important takeaways from the Bloomberg Invest Summit last Tuesday and Wednesday.
This ongoing conversation is occurring in a market backdrop where index exchange-traded funds (ETFs) have become massive as the stock market (^GSPC) has rallied for over eight years. Stock-picking, active fund managers have seen their picks get lost in a rising market that has lifted all boats. It’s a tide that has seen billions flow out of actively-managed funds and into passively-managed funds.
“I’m 100% convinced that is only because the stock market has done nothing but go up since ’08 in a straight line,” Michael Bloomberg said at the Bloomberg Invest Summit. “And if any money manager knew it was going to do that, you’d just buy the S&P ETFs and go play golf.”
Until something turns, the matters of high costs and poor performance among hedge fund managers and those running actively-managed mutual funds will continue to be widely publicized, encouraging investors to seek low-cost options. And professionals in this industry need to understand this is just part of the job.
“That’s what capitalism is all about,” Bloomberg added.
Where’s the alpha that investors are paying for?
Investors may hope that the hedge funds they select will beat the market, but this is rarely the stated objective of most hedge fund managers. Most promise to deliver a specialized kind of performance that is agnostic to what the market may be doing.
But regardless of the services money managers selling, investors—like pension funds and endowments—want alpha. But they haven’t been getting that from hedge fund investments in recent years.
“You’ve got to make some money for us to view it as true alpha,” Marc Levine, the chairman of Illinois State Board of Investment pension fund, said at the Bloomberg Invest Summit. Levine noted that the $20 billion fund lowered its allocation target for hedge funds to 3% from 10% while also reducing its number of hedge fund investments to 17 from a “ridiculous” 81.
A simple way of explaining alpha is excess return. Hedge fund manager Jason Karp, the founder of Tourbillon Capital, said another way of putting it is “a return that’s not explained by the market.”
“In the last ten years, a lot of things like value, growth, dividend type investing have become betas now because the rise of passive has created a lot of ETFs where you can actually replicate all these different factors, and you recreate these returns much more cheaply than you used to be able to do,” Karp said at the same Bloomberg event.
In other words, trading value, growth or dividend strategies were once ways to get a return in excess of a broad market index like the S&P 500. Fund managers could charge high fees for this service. Now, those strategies have themselves become cheaply tradable indexes.
Jason Karp, the founder of Tourbillon Capital
He continued: “I would add on the definition of, ‘Can you replicate someone’s returns easily with two or three ETFs? Where you can actually measure the amount of variance in their returns that you can actually correlate to specific ETFs?’ And if you can replicate someone’s returns with the Nasdaq 100 that you can buy for three basis points and be infinitely liquid, then that’s not alpha.”
So, the opportunities professionals have to generate alpha are shrinking.
It feels like fund managers are ‘eating the whole pie’
Lackluster performance tends to reignite the age-old debate about cost structure. Hedge funds often charge investors a fee known as “2-and-20”, meaning 2% of assets (management fee) and 20% of profits (performance fee). Those fees can vary with some being lower and others being higher like 3% and 30%.
These fees become harder to justify when funds aren’t delivering alpha (and indexing is cheap). When the alpha on manager’s investment decisions are low, much of it gets eaten up by the fees before any money lands in the investor’s pocket.
“If we’re making net alpha 50 [basis points] — 100 [basis points] and we are paying 2-and-20 — there’s a gross alpha pie being created and the other guy is eating the whole pie!” Levine said. “And that’s not fair. That’s not right. We manage money for 130,000 beneficiaries and I think they deserve at least half the pie.”
Warren Buffett
Warren Buffett
Warren Buffett, the CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, has also been a critic of hedge funds and their fees. The 86-year-old multibillionaire has argued that it’s odd that if you have $1 billion in assets under management, you get paid $20 million just for terrible performance.
“In any other field, that would just blow your mind,” Buffett said last month at Berkshire’s annual shareholders’ meeting. “People get so used to it in the field of investment.”
Buffett has long recommended that both large and small investors put their money in low-cost index funds, like those offered by Bogle’s Vanguard.
Meanwhile, some funds are breaking away from the traditional 2-and-20 model to better accommodate investor expectations. For example, Karp’s Tourbillon Capital offers two funds, including a long alpha fund that only collects a performance fee only if it beats a blended benchmark of the MSCI World Index and the S&P 500.
The fees are easily defensible in certain markets
Karp also offers a long/short equity fund, which doesn’t really have a benchmark to measure against. He pointed out that hedge funds that actually hedge or have a lower net exposure to the market aren’t going to have returns that are “as pretty” as those that are just long the index during a bull market.
Instead, Karp thinks the “true measure” of success can be measured during sustained periods of economic recession, anemic growth, or market downturns that last longer than a quarter. During these times, investors should ask, “Is the hedge fund providing you a diversifier and a service that you can’t easily replicate by holding puts or some form of insurance?”
Bloomberg, who described himself as bearish for the “last half dozen years,” expects that at some point things will turn and the fees will be justified.
“That’s when you want to hire people with active management,” Bloomberg said. “And 2-and-20 if that’s what you’ve got to pay, or 3-and-30, anything that gets you alpha, you’re going to do that.”
The market needs active management, but it isn’t for everyone
Quantitative investor Cliff Asness, the CIO of AQR Capital, has been a vocal critic of hedge funds charging alpha fees while delivering beta performance. But this time, he gave somewhat of a defense of managers aiming to beat the market, noting that it’s an “oversold story” that active managers aren’t needed at all.
“I am, by the way, beginning to think that I’m being a bit of an apologist for them because I am one of those people who thinks we need a certain amount of active management,” Asness said on his panel at Bloomberg. “The world is not going to be all cap-weighted, and it’s not going to be all quant. Somebody has got to actually look at companies.”
It’s not a “radical view,” he added, pointing to recent comments Vanguard founder Jack Bogle made about indexing. Last month, Bogle told Yahoo Finance’s editor-in-chief Andy Serwer that if everybody indexed it would be “chaos” and “catastrophe.” Bogle noted that one-quarter of the U.S. stock market is currently indexed. He estimated that he would be comfortable if indexing got to 75%.
“I’ll go with Jack,” Asness said. “We need active management. We need good active management.”
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