Daniel Benton’s Andor Opportunity Fund, which may be the most volatile hedge fund around these days, posted a 13.6 percent loss in October alone. This puts the long-short equity fund managed by Benton’s Rye Brook, New York-based firm, Andor Capital Management, down about 9 percent for the year to date.
The technology and Internet-focused fund has lost more than 18 percent in the past two months alone. Remember, this is a fund that surged about 14 percent in August and 19.5 percent in June.
Which investments hurt Andor the most in October? At the end of September, the fund had $2.15 billion in U.S. equity assets, according to its 13F filed Tuesday morning. As usual, a small number of stocks accounted for the bulk of the portfolio. For example, three stocks accounted for 40 percent of Andor’s assets at the end of September: Tesla Motors, Twitter and Apple.
In October, Tesla, the electric-vehicle maker, was essentially flat. Apple, which was Andor’s third-largest holding, rose more than 7 percent for the month. However, Twitter, the second-largest holding, with nearly 14 percent of assets, fell nearly 20 percent for the month.
The rest of Andor’s portfolio was not as concentrated as it had been previously. Facebook, its fourth-largest holding, accounted for about 5 percent of assets after Andor halved its position in the third quarter. Just as well. The stock lost more than 6 percent in October.
Andor’s fifth-largest holding was RF Micro Devices after the fund boosted its stake from four million shares to ten million shares in the third quarter. Good timing. The stock jumped 13 percent in October.
Solar energy company SolarCity Corp., the sixth-largest holding, slipped less than 1 percent. Last quarter Andor boosted its stake by 23 percent.
Of the next two largest holdings, software company Workday surged 13 percent, but video streaming service Netflix lost 13 percent, essentially offsetting each other.
In the third quarter Andor added eight new stocks to its portfolio, but none of them was of meaningful size. They include DreamWorks Animation, Tableau Software and Yelp.
The fund also closed out a number of positions, including OpenTable, TripAdvisor and Amazon.com. But keep in mind that none of the stocks eliminated from the portfolio was among the eight stocks that accounted for 75 percent of its assets at the end of June.
Benton was a co-founder of the once-venerable but now-defunct hedge fund Pequot Capital Management. Andor spun out of Pequot in 2001 and managed as much as $9.6 billion at the peak in 2003.
After suffering huge losses in the 2008 financial crisis, Benton shut down his fund. He launched his comeback in 2011.
