Joshua Resnick is quickly regaining his status as one of the best-performing long-short equity hedge fund managers around these days.
After suffering a setback last year, the founder of New York–based Jericho Capital Asset Management has been on a tear once again this year. His fund, Jericho Capital Partners, posted a 4 percent profit in September when most long-short equity funds — and most other strategies, for that matter — lost money, in some cases large sums. This boosted Resnick’s gain for the first nine months to an impressive 11 percent.
It also enabled Resnick to shrug off his 7 percent or so loss in August, in part because of some positions in Asia, including China.
Resnick, you may recall, drew a lot of attention after posting gains of 24.4 percent in 2012 and 33.85 in 2013.
This year Jericho’s long book — top-heavy with Internet issues such as Chinese search company Baidu and Chinese e-commerce site JD.com — is said to have more or less held its own. However, Jericho has done exceptionally well with its short positions, according to a person with knowledge of the firm’s performance.
In fact, since inception, Jericho Capital Partners is said to be materially positive in its short book, which is better than many of the other top long-short managers can say.
In September, Jericho especially benefited from a deft, prescient, big bet on Cablevision Systems Corp., the large cable operator. Jericho chose Cablevision as its one stock to focus on in the report, asserting in part that Cablevision was a prime takeover target and even going as far as predicting it might receive an acquisition offer from Netherlands-based telecommunications giant Altice, according to a person who saw the firm’s second-quarter letter.
On Monday Jericho disclosed in an amended 13F filing that it owned 761,000 shares of Cablevision, worth $18 million at the end of June.
Sure enough, on September 17, Altice agreed to acquire Cablevision for $10 billion. The stock jumped 14 percent on the news and surged 29 percent in September alone.
Presumably, Jericho bought a lot more shares in the third quarter, and they played a major part in the fund’s September performance.
Resnick has been a media specialist ever since graduating from Emory University in 1995 with a BA in economics.
He spent two years as a financial analyst at Bear Stearns in its media and entertainment group and then went on to work in Twentieth Century Fox Television’s business development group, reviewing mergers, acquisitions, joint ventures and investments, according to an article in Variety in 1999. He was involved in several high-profile deals, including News Corp.’s 50 percent asset purchase of Fox Entertainment Group/Liberty Media, the sale of American Sky Broadcasting to EchoStar Communications Corp., and the partnership between the National Geographic Channel and NBC, according to the trade newspaper.
Resnick then became a managing director of KPE Ventures — a now-defunct venture capital fund that specialized in media, entertainment and technology — before joining TCS Capital Management, a hedge fund, where he spent seven and a half years, eventually rising to managing director. He left in December 2008.
Resnick launched his firm in 2009, initially focusing on the so-called TMT sector: technology, media and telcommunications, as well as Internet stocks. He nearly doubled assets from $585 million at the end of 2011 to more than $1 billion at the start of 2013 and then nearly doubled them again to almost $2 billion at the end of 2013 following that very strong year. At that point, Resnick hard-closed the fund.
At the time, Resnick was considered one of the industry’s hottest new long-short managers. However, he suffered a setback last year, when his fund lost 7.8 percent.
Now Resnick is apparently back on track, given his double-digit gains and ability to post a very strong profit in September.
