Chase Coleman’s Tiger Global Management finished 2011 up 45 percent, making it perhaps the best performing hedge fund last year.
The Tiger Cub, who manages $6 billion in his hedge fund, was up 44 percent by the end of August in part from both going long Internet stocks as well as shorting them when the market was falling last summer. He essentially was unable to add to his gains in the final four months.
Altogether, Coleman manages $10 billion, including $4 billion in six private equity funds. He is widely known for making big bets on start-up and fledgling Internet companies around the world, a number of them privately held. Among his most celebrated stakes are in Facebook and LinkedIn.
His largest public holding by far in his hedge fund is Yandex, the most popular Internet company in Russia and its largest search engine. It accounted for more than $1 billion of his $5 billion long-stock portfolio, making him the company’s largest shareholder. After Yandex, his largest holdings are familiar names: Apple, Viacom, Liberty Global, Visa and Mastercard.
He is also the largest shareholder of Bitauto Holdings Ltd., which provides Internet content for the automotive industry in China; MakeMyTrip Ltd., the largest travel site in India; and Homeaway Inc., a website that markets vacation rentals.
Coleman, who is known to having longer lock-ups than the typical hedge fund firm, has over the past year offered investors opportunities to redeem early from the hedge fund.
Coleman is clearly the most successful of the Tiger Seed breed, those managers who were staked personally by Tiger Management founder Julian Robertson.
He joined Tiger as a technology analyst after graduating from Williams College with an economics degree in 1997. In 2001 he started Tiger Technology—now called Tiger Global—a long/short equity fund that was one of the first hedge funds seeded by Robertson, who retained an equity interest in the fund.
Tiger Global was up 18 percent in 2010 after climbing just 1 percent the prior year and losing 26 percent in 2008.
Coleman came from old money. He grew up Charles Payson Coleman III in Old Brookville on Long Island’s North Shore and is a descendant of Peter Stuyvesant, the last Dutch governor of New York who built the “wall” on Wall Street.
