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Einhorn’s Greenlight Recoups 9.4% in 2016 as Stocks Rally

Einhorn’s Greenlight Recoups 9.4% in 2016 as Stocks Rally

(Bloomberg) -- Greenlight Capital, the hedge fund led by David Einhorn, rose 1.6 percent in December, riding a year-end rally in U.S. stocks.

The performance rounds out a gain of 9.4 percent in 2016 for the firm’s main hedge fund, which mostly makes wagers on stocks, according to an e-mail viewed by Bloomberg.

While Einhorn is ending the year up, he still hasn’t fully recovered from a loss of 20 percent in 2015. The S&P 500 Total Return Index, a measure that includes reinvested dividends, rebounded from January and February losses to end the year about 12 percent higher. The average hedge fund gained 4.5 percent in 2016 through November, according to Hedge Fund Research Inc.

Jonathan Gasthalter, an outside spokesman for New York-based Greenlight, declined to comment.

Allocators are increasingly turning away from hedge funds as their returns have trailed stock markets. In 2016, they pulled money from some of the best-known funds in the industry, including Paul Tudor Jones’s Tudor Investment Corp. and Alan Howard’s Brevan Howard Asset Management.

Investors stuck with Greenlight after last year, pulling roughly 5 percent of the firm’s overall assets after the losses. This year marks the fifth year in a row that Greenlight’s main fund has lagged behind the S&P 500 Total Return Index.

Einhorn has said this year that the firm lost money on its short portfolio, which includes wagers against energy companies he’s called the “mother-frackers” and a “bubble basket” of stocks including Athenahealth Inc. Greenlight’s largest disclosed holdings at the end of the third quarter, Apple Inc. and General Motors Co., rose 10 percent and 2.4 percent, respectively, in 2016, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

To contact the reporter on this story: Simone Foxman in New York at sfoxman4@bloomberg.net. To contact the editors responsible for this story: Margaret Collins at mcollins45@bloomberg.net, Josh Friedman, Alan Mirabella