Tiger Cub Chase Coleman’s hedge fund, Tiger Global, racked up another 2.5 percent profit in May, boosting his full-year gain to between 18.5 percent and 19 percent, according to knowledgeable sources.
This is especially remarkable given that the S&P 500 lost 6.3 percent in May and the Nasdaq Composite dropped 7.2 percent.
Coleman has been generating huge gains from big bets on Internet stocks. He is also said to be well hedged, making money on some of his shorts.
An early investor in Facebook when it was private, he shrewdly unloaded a big stake in the recent controversial initial public offering. According to public filings, he sold about 23.4 million of his roughly 54 million shares at the IPO price of around $38 (before underwriting fees).
At the end of the first quarter, Yandex, the most popular Internet company in Russia and its largest search engine, remained his largest stock holding. Its stock had surged 33 percent in the first quarter. However, it has since tumbled and is down slightly for the year.
The next six sizable holdings as of the end of March were Apple, Google, Liberty Global, MasterCard, Priceline.com and Visa.
Coleman took 12 new positions in the quarter, led by footwear company Deckers Outdoor and telecommunications company Frontier Communications.
He also sold out positions in 10 companies. They include Coinstar, maker of coin machines, and IAC Interactive, an Internet company that owns more than 50 brands in 40 countries.
Coleman manages roughly $6 billion in his hedge funds and more than $13 billion all together, including private equity funds. He reported more than $5.9 billion in his U.S. stock portfolio as of the end of the first quarter.
Coleman — who grew up Charles Payson Coleman III in Old Brookville on Long Island’s North Shore — joined Julian Robertson’s Tiger Management as a technology analyst after graduating from Williams College with degrees in economics and Spanish 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.
