Viking, Coatue Post Gains as Rising Stocks Boost Hedge Funds
Viking, Coatue Post Gains as Surging Stocks Boost Hedge Funds
(Bloomberg) -- Equity hedge funds including Philippe Laffont’s Coatue Management and Andreas Halvorsen’s Viking Global Investors are making money in 2019, boosted by a strong stock market.
Coatue’s flagship hedge fund returned 3.7% last month and 12% this year through April. Laffont’s firm, which focuses on investing in technology, media and telecommunications stocks, managed about $16 billion as of Dec. 31.
Viking’s Global Equities was up 0.8% in April and 11% in 2019. Viking manages $28 billion in assets, including $16.8 billion in the Global Equities hedge fund, which suffered from plunging oil prices at the end of 2018 yet still managed to gain 1% for the year.
Industrywide, funds gained 1.5% last month and 6.6% year-to-date on average, according to Bloomberg’s Hedge Fund Database. Still, the S&P 500 Index has persistently outperformed the industry, returning about 4% in April and 18% in the first four months of 2019, with reinvested dividends.
Here’s a look at the performance of some funds based on people
familiar with the returns.
Renaissance Technologies, the $60 billion quantitative hedge fund firm founded by billionaire James Simons, also is getting a boost from the stock market. Its Renaissance Institutional Equities Fund, or RIEF, gained 2% in April and 7% this year. The same fund, which managed about $29 billion in assets as of March, bucked last year’s stock tumult, gaining 8.5 percent in 2018.
Steve Cohen’s multistrategy firm Point72 Asset Management also has been among the better performers, returning 2.5% in April and 7.4% in 2019.
Activist funds also did well in the first four months of the year. Atlantic Investment Management’s Cambrian Fund rose 5.5% in April, bringing its 2019 return to almost 25%.
The main hedge fund at Blue Harbour Group posted a 4.5% gain last month and 19% for 2019, driven by long wagers in Canadian software company Open Text Corp. and programmable-chip maker Xilinx Inc. The firm, based in Greenwich, Connecticut, told investors in April that it had finished exiting its Xilinx position during the first quarter.
Activist funds, which take stakes in companies and agitate for change, on average rose 3% in April and are up about 12% for the year, according Hedge Fund Research Inc.
Here’s how other hedge funds have fared:
Fund Name | April Return | YTD Through April |
|---|---|---|
| Atlantic’s Cambrian | 5.5% | 25% |
| Balyasny Atlas Enhanced | 3.7 | 8.1 |
| Blue Harbour Active Ownership Partners | 4.5 | 19 |
| Brahman Partners II | 0.9 | 9.1 |
| Carlson Capital Double Black Diamond | 0.8 | 2.5 |
| Coatue Qualified Partners | 3.7 | 12 |
| Elliott Associates | 0.5 | 1.9 |
| Highbridge Multi-strategy | 1.8 | 4.6 |
| Kingdon Global Long-Short Equity | 3.6 | 13 |
| Light Street Mercury Master | 2.7 | 16 |
| Marshall Wace Eureka | -0.1 | 4.6 |
| Millennium | 0.4 | 2.2 |
| Moore Global Investments | 0 | 0.8 |
| Moore Macro Managers | 0.8 | 0.6 |
| Point72 Asset Management | 2.5 | 7.4 |
| Renaissance Institutional Equities (RIEF) | 2 | 7 |
| Taconic Opportunity | 1.1 | 3 |
| Tudor’s Riverbend | 2 | 3 |
| Viking Global Equities | 0.8 | 11 |
Representatives for the firms declined to comment.
--With assistance from Melissa Karsh and Hema Parmar.
To contact the reporter on this story: Alexandra Stratton in New York at astratton4@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Margaret Collins at mcollins45@bloomberg.net, Josh Friedman, Alan Mirabella
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