Each business day HedgeCo.Net keeps you informed with the top hedge fund industry news, opinion and insight from around the globe. From the latest hedge fund launches, to the impact of regulation, competition, and investor activism - we track the topics and people that make a difference to you.
HedgeTracker – The top solar hedge fund investor is Lee Ainslie’s Maverick Capital. Mr. Ainslie is a “Tiger Cub,” or a former protégé of Julian Robertson of Tiger Management. As of Q1 ’09, the fund had $180.33mm of its $5,529mm, or 3.26% of its portfolio, invested in solar. However, Maverick Capital is not necessarily a believer in the solar sector overall, as the firm’s solar exposure is entirely concentrated in First Solar Inc. (FSLR) with 1,358,902 shares. Notably, over the first quarter, the firm purchased $85.29mm or 642,756 shares of FSLR.
Seeking Alpha – Continuing our series of hedge fund profiles and biographies, we turn our attention now to Lee Ainslie of Maverick Capital. We thought this transition was appropriate given how we just yesterday initiated our profile series with coverage of hedge fund legend Julian Robertson of Tiger Management. (We also covered Robertson’s big inflation bet as well). We turn to Lee Ainslie of Maverick Capital now because Ainslie formerly worked under Julian at Tiger. As such, he is a ‘Tiger Cub’ and employs much of the investment methodologies he learned while at Tiger as their technology analyst.
Ainslie graduated from the University of Virginia and then received his MBA from the University of North Carolina. He founded Maverick Capital at age 29 in 1993 with $38 million in seed capital from Texas entrepreneur Sam Wyly. Maverick has offices both in Dallas and New York and now managers well over $5 billion. They are a long/short equity hedge fund in the ‘old school’ sense of the word.
Greenwich Time – The Greenwich-based Viking hedge fund group run by Andreas Halvorsen started a new fund to focus on buying stocks after selling them short became more risky.
Viking Long Fund LP began trading last month after initially raising about $80 million, the firm said in a Jan. 15 filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Halvorsen, a former protege of hedge-fund manager Julian Robertson at Tiger Management LLC — making him a so-called "Tiger cub" — oversees about $9.5 billion at Viking Global Investors LP in Greenwich.
The new fund avoids selling stocks short, which is a departure from Viking’s long-short strategy of trying to make money regardless of the market’s direction. In an October letter to investors, Halvorsen said the scope for expansion is much greater for buying stocks than for selling them with the expectation of further drops.
New York Times Blogs – Bill Clinton has plenty of friends in high finance.
Lifting a longstanding cloak of secrecy, the former president last week released a complete list of about 208,000 donors to his foundation as part of an agreement to check against possible conflicts, as his wife, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, is in line to become the next secretary of state.
While the list has been heavily scrutinized from a geopolitical perspective, it is also interesting to note how many heavy hitters from the financial world were contributors.
Hedge funds were big donors to Mr. Clinton’s organization over the years. The Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, the charitable arm of the United Kingdom-based activist hedge fund, gave more than $25 million to the Clinton foundation, making it one of the top two donors on the list, along with Unitaid, an international organization that fights H.I.V and AIDS.
Other contributors from the hedge fund world included EIM Group’s Arpad Busson; Julian Robertson, the founder of Tiger Management; and Sterling Stamos Capital Management, the hedge fund founded by New York Mets owner Fred Wilpon, who was recently stung by Bernard Madoff’s fraud. Each gave between $1 million to $5 million, records show.
