The managers known as Tiger Cubs—so called for their origins at Tiger Management—have been pummeled by the same batch of highly-priced tech stocks that earned them billions, reports Yahoo! Finance. Chase Coleman of Tiger Global Management lost $16 billion in investor capital this year through April while Dan Sundheim’s most popular portfolio at D1 Capital Partners dropped 19%. Many of the other Tiger Cubs, including Andreas Halvorsen of Viking Global Investors, Steve Mandel of Lone Pine Capital, Lee Ainslie of Maverick Capital and Philippe Laffont of Coatue Management all held some of the lowest-performing stock in their portfolios at the end of last year.
Several notable underperforming stocks in the portfolios included Carvana, Netflix, and Shopify—all stocks that soared high during the pandemic when consumers were on lockdown. But it remains to be seen whether any of the aforementioned Tiger Cubs sold off their tech holdings in the first quarter of this year. Those answers may come soon asset managers disclose which U.S. shares they owned at the end March. Those tech shares have fallen as much as 84% this year, and a big sell-off from these major hedge funds could have played a role in that rout.
While Amazon and Microsoft were two very popular stocks among hedge funds in general, Tiger Cubs accounted for a particularly big share of the overall exposure to the most vulnerable stocks: EV start-up Rivian, online retailer FarFetch and Doordash Inc. accounted for more than 50%, the article details.
The Tiger Cubs have held the status of some of the most successful equity hedge funds on Wall Street, posting double-digit returns and garnering billions of dollars in profits. Coatue gained 62% and Tiger Global 47% in 2020. That past success makes these current losses incredibly surprising. Virtually all of the 42 stocks owned by half or more of the Tiger Cubs at the end of 2021 are down this year, and nearly 90% of those stocks performed worse than the Nasdaq 100’s 27% loss this year.
Of those 42 stocks, Lone Pine owned 80%, the largest overlap of all the Tiger Cubs. The hedge fund lost 22% in the first quarter of this year. That’s 12% less than Tiger Global’s losses, leading to speculation about how each Tiger Cub has handled the market rout. It’s suspected that given Tiger Global’s huge losses, that firm probably held onto too many of those underperforming positions well into 2022, the article contends. Last month, the firm wrote to their investors that they are “reassessing and refining our models” in a letter that is quoted in the article.