Valiant Capital Partners is on pace to report its best results in five years after posting another large gain in June.
The Tiger Grandcub’s liquid portfolio surged 7.29 percent in June and nearly 28 percent in the second quarter. As a result, Valiant, headed by Chris Hansen, is up 33.47 percent for the year, says an investor. This is its best start since 2020, when it finished the year up more than 57 percent.
The long-short hedge fund is one of the top-performing hedge funds this year and perhaps the best performer within the Tiger Kingdom. The stellar results come on the heels of strong results in 2024 and 2023, when the fund posted gains of about 28 and 24 percent, respectively.
Valiant’s success this year has been driven by profitability in the long and short books. Through May, when the fund was up 30 percent or so gross, longs kicked in more than 17 percent to gains and the short book added more than 11 percent, according to the May monthly exposure report, obtained by Institutional Investor. Macro contributed more than 1 percent to gross gains, but fixed income knocked off about 50 basis points.
Altogether, at the end of May Valiant had a total gross exposure of about 262 percent. Its equity gross exposure entering June was a little more than 229 percent, and net equity exposure was just over 47 percent. The bulk of the exposure was to industrials and information technology. It is not known what role Valiant’s longs and shorts in those two industries cumulatively played in performance over the first five months of the year or in June.
In Valiant’s first-quarter client letter, dated about April 15, the hedge fund stated that during the early-year stock market sell-off, it added to its “high-conviction longs,” covered shorts where the risk reward grew unfavorable, and stuck with or added to shorts it believes “will/may collapse into the abyss during a recession.”
At the time of the letter’s writing, Valiant said it had covered almost all of its U.S. equity put positions. “With volatility at extreme levels, the cost of this ‘insurance’ is far too high and we have been fortunate to be selling our put positions into this vol spike as a result,” it explained. “And while we have very little equity put options left outside of our Nifty hedges (India), given our credit hedges and the quality of our short book, we feel really good about our ability to protect capital if the market dislocates further.”
As of the end of May, Valiant’s five largest equity positions accounted for roughly 33 percent of exposure. They were Germany’s Siemens Energy; chip maker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing; drug giant Eli Lilly; construction and information services provider Argan; and Core Scientific, a provider of digital mining infrastructure, software, and services.
