Einhorn's Greenlight Posts 4 Percent August Gain

David Einhorn’s Greenlight Capital posted a 4 percent gain in August.

This put the hedge fund manager up 9.7 percent for the year to date.

The early results come from an investment account of Greenlight Capital Re — an insurance company controlled by Einhorn — that is managed by a Greenlight Capital entity.

It reported that at the end of August, the largest disclosed long positions in its investment portfolio were Apple, Arkema, General Motors, gold, Marvell Technology Group and Seagate Technology. These were the same largest reported positions at the end of July, except for Arkema, a chemical maker.

Its investment portfolio was roughly 101 percent long and 61 percent short, roughly in line with the previous month.

This exposure analysis does not include gold, credit default swaps, sovereign debt, cash, foreign currency positions, interest rate derivatives and other macro positions.

In a recent conference call discussing Greenlight Re’s first-half results, Einhorn said General Motors and Marvell Technology both have mid-single-digit PEs of current earnings and have strong cash positions. GM is currently trading around gross cash and Marvell has about 35 percent of its market cap in cash.

During the second quarter Greenlight also made a big bet on a pair of managed-care companies leading up to the Supreme Court’s historic decision regarding Obamacare in late June.

The hedge fund manager told clients in the firm’s second-quarter letter to its hedge fund clients that it established “substantial new positions” in Cigna and Coventry Health Care, noting that the entire sector had been battered in anticipation of the High Court’s ruling.

Greenlight also closed out several positions in the second quarter. They include Dell, which it called a “disappointment,” and Best Buy, which it called “particularly irksome.”