Tiger Global Management established sizable new stakes in Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding and the C shares of Alphabet, the parent of search giant Google. Those positions are now the fifth- and eighth-largest U.S. longs, respectively, in the Tiger Cub’s portfolio as of September 30, according to the hedge fund firm’s latest quarterly 13F filing. New York–based Tiger Global was an early investor in Alibaba when it was still a private business. However, it sold most of its shares within a year after the company went public in 2014 and was totally out of the stock at the end of last year. Tiger Global, founded by Charles (Chase) Coleman III, boosted its stake in its biggest long, online travel agency Priceline Group, by 22 percent. The firm also trimmed its next three largest positions: e-commerce titan Amazon.com, cable and broadband leader Charter Communications, and Chinese e-commerce player JD.com. ___
Stanley Druckenmiller’s Duquesne Family Office more than doubled its stake in its top holding, an exchange-traded fund that tracks emerging markets. As a result, the stock, the iShares MSCI Emerging Markets Index ETF, accounts for 15 percent of Duquesne’s $1.13 billion in U.S. long assets. The firm also took a new position of 407,600 shares in Alibaba, making that company its No. 4 U.S. long.
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Farallon Capital Management established a new stake of more than 2 million shares of Herbalife, the controversial multilevel marketer of nutrition and health care products. It is not known what price the San Francisco–headquartered hedge fund firm paid for the shares, now its 16th-largest U.S. long stock position. Last week billionaire Carl Icahn disclosed that he had doubled his stake in Herbalife, which has been fighting a big negative bet by Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square Capital Management.
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Seth Klarman’s Baupost Group reduced its U.S. equity portfolio to $7 billion at the end of the third quarter, from nearly $7.4 billion for the previous three-month period. The Boston-based eclectic investor managed a total of $28.5 billion at the start of the year.
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Elliott Management said in a regulatory filing that it would vote in favor of Mentor Graphics’ planned acquisition by German industrial conglomerate Siemens. The New York hedge fund manager owns 8.3 percent of Mentor, a U.S. automation and industrial software provider. In early October, Elliott disclosed an 8.1 percent stake in Mentor; it also said the company’s stock is deeply undervalued and that it has spoken with management and the board of directors about ways to boost the price.
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Omega Advisors vice chairman Steven Einhorn is bullish on stocks, citing U.S. president-elect Donald Trump’s policies, including the repatriation of earnings and lower taxes. “The outlook for the equity market for next year should be as good or a bit better than this year,” Einhorn said yesterday at the Reuters Global Investment Outlook Summit in New York. He told his audience that he expects stocks to rise in price by 6 percent and for dividends to boost the total return to 8 percent, according to Reuters. For Einhorn, the biggest risk is that returns will be higher than his anticipated target. “The odds favor exceeding it rather than missing it,” he said at the conference.
