No hedge fund firm has produced more stars than Julian Robertson Jr.’s Tiger Management. The co-founders of Tiger-seeded, $1.7 billion Axial Capital Management are considered to be among the best of the current residents at 101 Park Avenue in New York, Tiger HQ. Marc Andersen, a 36-year-old Princeton University grad with a BS in mechanical engineering, and Eliav Assouline, 37, who has an MBA from the Harvard Business School and an economics degree from the Wharton School, were contemporaries as investment bankers at Bear Stearns Cos. in the late 1990s. After heading to the buy side, they teamed up in 2002 to form Axial Capital. In the classic Tiger model, Axial is opportunistic, going long value-oriented businesses in the U.S. and Europe where the supply-demand dynamics favor the firm and shorting those where the equation is reversed. Market participants say Assouline is known to be a demon short-seller. Something is clearly working: Axial ended 2008 — a year that was tough on hedge funds and revealed which managers can generate the most profit from short-selling — in the black.
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