A hotshot up-and-coming hedge fund manager whose fund is suffering its first steep loss this year was reportedly arrested Saturday night in the Hamptons for driving under the influence following a two-car accident. Sahm Adrangi, the 35-year-old founder of New York-based Kerrisdale Capital, crashed his 2015 BMW convertible into a Ford sport-utility vehicle, according to the East Hampton Star. Adrangi refused to submit to a breathalyzer test. As a result his driver’s license was suspended. He was charged with driving under the influence, and cocaine was found in his car, East Hampton police told Reuters. Adrangi, a Yale graduate, had posted double-digit or triple-digit gains since he launched his main fund, Kerrisdale Partners, in 2009. However, the fund was down 12.1 percent this year through June, according to its second-quarter letter. As of March 1, Kerrisdale managed $389 million. It has since raised $100 million for a special fund created to short shares of satellite TV provider Dish Network.
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Jeffrey Smith’s Starboard Value has identified its newest activist target. The New York hedge fund manager disclosed it now owns 9.9 percent of Stewart Information Services Corp., a title insurance and real estate services company. So far, Starboard has not shown its cards, noting in a regulatory filing that it currently does not have “any present plan or proposal.” This status probably won’t last too long, however.
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Elliott Management Corp. bought about 600,000 shares of Lifelock, boosting the New York hedge fund manager’s economic exposure in the Tempe, Arizona-based identity-theft protection company to 10.9 percent.
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Stanley Druckenmiller’s Duquesne Family Office cut its U.S. stock portfolio by 35 percent, to $870 million. It also closed out its huge stake in an exchange-traded fund that bets on the direction of the price of gold. George Soros’ former triggerman also established new positions in 20 stocks, including large stakes in energy giant Halliburton and drugmaker AbbVie, making them his second and third largest U.S. long positions.
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Seth Klarman’s Baupost Group boosted its U.S. equity portfolio to $7.4 billion in the second quarter from $6.9 billion the previous period. This is the largest equity exposure the eclectic investor has maintained in its history. Equities now account for 26 percent of the $28.5 billion the Boston firm was managing at the beginning of the year. In the first half of the year, Baupost, which also may invest in mortgage securities, debt and private companies, was up 4 percent. Baupost’s largest equity position is in EMC, accounting for 21 percent of the stock portfolio.
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Christopher Hohn’s TCI Fund Management established a new, 11.6 million share position in cable and Internet giant Charter Communications in the second quarter. It also liquidated two of its U.S. equity longs in the second quarter. One of them was Chinese internet search company Baidu. The London firm’s largest U.S. long remains embattled internet giant Yahoo. TCI returned about 2.8 percent in the first half of the year, according to sources. (An earlier version of this item misstated the number of stocks the firm sold in the second quarter.)
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Julian Robertson, Jr.’s Tiger Management established three new stakes in the second quarter that now rank among its 10 largest U.S. longs — Irish drugmaker Shire, software giant Microsoft and streaming music company Pandora Media.
