Your nonna’s favourite activist hedge fund is back. Starboard Value, famous for a 300-slide presentation delivered to Italian restaurant chain Olive Garden’s management in which it offered suggestions such as ‘salt the pasta water’ and ‘fried lasagna bites are not authentic Italian’, is now buying SaaS companies.

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• 💹 US and European stocks extend rally while bond yields fall.

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• 🚫 UK regulators will force Meta to sell Giphy over competition concerns.

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Activist Investor Starboard sees buying opportunities

Starboard Value appears to be a disciple of the credo ‘the time to buy is when there’s blood in the streets’, as it continues to disclose stakes in SaaS companies after the tech rout.

Last month, Starboard revealed a stake in website building platform Wix. On Monday, the Wall Street Journal reported ($) that Starboard had built up a 5% stake in data monitoring and analysis firm Splunk, and yesterday, Starboard disclosed it has taken a significant stake in Salesforce. The stocks of all three companies went up on the news.

Starboard is most active in the technology sector and targets companies where it believes operational improvements can be made. It has occasionally strayed — the most memorable of such occasions was in 2014 when it took on Darden Restaurants, owner of the Olive Garden restaurant chain.

Starboard took exception to the authenticity of the Italian cuisine being served and offered a series of recommendations. John Oliver provides a hilarious summary of its operational recommendations in this video. Darden’s share price shot up 60% after Starboard took over.

The content we're consuming today

• Financial Times: The plight of expat workers at KPMG Saudi Arabia ($) — “You wipe your nose wrong as a western expat and you can be dealt with harshly.”

Off-balance sheet items

• Super interesting video from Hackerdashery on P vs. NP and the Computational Complexity Zoo, explaining why I failed to make my own crossword that time.

The bottom line