Chris Shumway’s not the only hedge fund with Tiger ties to be suffering these days. At least two others recently lost key people while a number of others had lousy years in 2010.
Shumway, you may recall, had received $3 billion of redemptions, or 37.5 percent of the firm’s $8 billion in assets, after he announced in November that he would no longer serve as chief investment officer of Shumway Capital Partners and would serve the more managerial role of chief executive officer. He said Tom Wilcox would run the daily operations of the firm Shumway founded in 2002, calling him the “single most profitable individual in our firm’s history.”
Investors, however, were unwilling to treat the two as equals.
Also last week, Dris Upitis, who had served on the management committee of Viking Capital, last week reportedly left the firm founded by Andreas Halvorsen, a former senior managing director and the director of equities at Tiger. Viking wound up finishing the year up just 4 percent. However, no crisis there. Viking was up 19 percent in 2009 and flat in 2008 when many managers were down 30 percent to 50 percent.
And last month Gil Caffray announced he would leave Touradji Capital Management as chief executive officer to become chief investment officer and a member of the management committee at Tiger Management.
The move came after Touradji, a commodities specialist who worked for Tiger from 1996 through 2000, generated a meager 2 percent gain in 2010.
Meanwhile, Tiger Asia, the one-time high-flying Tiger seed founded by Bill Hwang, finished 2010 up just 1.2 percent, his second consecutive low-single digit return after losing money in 2008. Until a few years ago, he was held up as a shining example of Robertson’s successful seeding program. Touradji and Hwang, however, fared better than a number of other Tiger-related managers, who lost money last year when a large number of hedge funds generated returns somewhere in the teens.
For example, TigerShark Management, a so-called seeded launched in February 2001, lost 6 percent, while Eliav Assouline and Marc Andersen’s hedge fund firm Axial Capital Management—also a seed--lost closer to 10 percent last year, according to an investor.
Chris Burn’s Goshen Global Equity L.P. lost nearly 11 percent last year after dropping more than 9 percent alone in December when the global stock markets surged. The very volatile fund had surged 55 percent and 73.4 percent in 2007 and 2008, respectively, its first two full years of operation, respectively, mostly from shorting financials.
