The Morning Brief: Tiger Veda to Wind Down

Manish Chopra’s Tiger Veda is the latest fund with roots in Julian Robertson Jr.’s Tiger Management to scale back or shut down altogether. The New York-based Tiger Seed, so called because it received start-up capital from Robertson’s firm, tells clients it is returning about 80 percent of its capital to investors by the end of the year and the remainder at the end of the first quarter of 2016, according to published reports.

Chopra launched Tiger Veda in 2005 after spending two years as a senior analyst at Tiger Management, working directly for Robertson. He earlier worked at Leon Cooperman’s New York-based Omega Advisors and New York-based Highbridge Capital, founded by childhood friends Glenn Dubin and Henry Swieca. Tiger Veda had $419 million at the end of August. At the time the long-short fund was down 7.9 percent for the year and had compounded at a 7.5 percent annualized rate since its May 205 inception. Its only losing year was 2008, when it finished down nearly 21 percent.

However, these days it is hard for a small fund to hold on to investors and key people when it stumbles. Tiger Veda is the third fund among the six that comprise the Tiger Accelerator fund of funds to scale back this year. In June Cascabel Management, seeded by Robertson in 2008, said it would liquidate 80 percent of its portfolio. The New York firm, headed by Scott Sinclair and Laurence Chang, had only $72 million. The other seed to scale back this year was James Davidson’s Long Oar Global Investors.

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Paul Singer’s New York-based Elliott Management boosted its stake in Citrix Systems to 8.6 percent. In late July, the software company announced a cooperation agreement with Elliott, which resulted in Elliott’s Jesse Cohn being named to Citrix’s board of directors, replacing Asiff Hirji, who resigned. The Fort Lauderdale, Florida company also said at the time it would seek another independent board member, mutually agreeable to Citrix and Elliott, to replace a current board member. Mark Templeton, Citrix’s president and chief executive officer, also announced plans to retire. Citrix’s board also announced the formation of an operations committee, which will work closely with management to develop an operational review focusing on improving Citrix’s margins, profitability and capital structure. The operations committee will be composed of four directors, including Cohn and the mutually agreed-upon new independent director.

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New York-based Glenview Capital Management boosted its stake in Humana to nearly 7.5 million shares, which works out to slightly more than 5 percent of the total shares. The Louisville-based health care giant earlier agreed to be acquired by Hartford, Connecticut-based Aetna.

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New York-based Eminence Capital disclosed it took a new passive position of about 9.62 million shares in Irving, Texas-based La Quinta Holdings, or 7.4 percent of the hotel chain’s total shares. It did not own any shares of the company at the end of the third quarter.

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Tiger Global Management participated in the latest, $120 million Series C financing of Grofers, an Indian e-commerce company. The New York investment firm previously invested in the company.

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