Correction? What correction?
Tiger Global’s Chase Coleman has added to what could turn out to be his best year ever.
The Tiger Seed was up 3.5 percent in August when the S&P 500 was down 5.7 percent. As a result, he is now up 45 percent year-to-date, according to investors.
Coleman is widely known for making big bets on Internet companies, a number of them privately-held. Among his most celebrated stakes are in Facebook and LinkedIn.
However, according to investors, this year he has actually made more money from his shorts than his longs.
Even so, Internet stocks are still an important part of his $5.2 billion long U.S. equities portfolio.
By far his largest holding is Yandex, the most popular internet company in Russia and its largest search engine, and he is the largest shareholder of Bitauto Holdings Ltd., which provides Internet content for the auto industry in China.
In addition, Amazon.com, Netflix, Priceline.com, and Baidu, the last of which provides Chinese- and Japanese-language Internet search services, are among his 10 largest holdings.
Coleman also has a number of investments in privately-held Internet companies.
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.
Coleman was the youngest of the group at the time.
By the end of 2007, Tiger Global had grown to more than $6 billion, with a seven-year annualized return of about 44 percent, including more than 70 percent in 2007.
However, he dropped 26 percent in 2008 and 1 percent in 2009, raising questions about whether he had seen his better days.
He rebounded in 2010, climbing 18 percent. And now he is up 45 percent this year when the global markets are down.
