| Barry Rosenstein, JANA Partners (Bloomberg) |
Barry Rosenstein’s JANA Partners extended its impressive winning streak in March. The long-short, sometime-activist firm has now posted gains for nine straight months and ten of the past 11 in its eponymous flagship hedge fund.
As a result, the fund is solidly in the black for the year.
JANA Partners posted a 0.4 percent gain in March and is now up 4.4 percent for the year. The firm’s more aggressive offering, the JANA Nirvana Fund, rose 0.5 percent last month and is up 6.6 percent for the year. This compares with a 6.1 percent gain for the Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index in the first quarter, including dividends reinvested.
As we have chronicled in the past, JANA’s recovery has coincided with a major revamping of its portfolio in the first half of last year. Its profitable run no doubt pleases the folks at Dyal Capital Partners, a unit of New York money manager Neuberger Berman, which in March 2015 bought a 20 percent stake in JANA.
It is not easy to discern which positions drove March performance. For example, JANA’s two newest activist positions, disclosed in late February, produced mixed results last month.
Shares of jewelry retailer Tiffany & Co. jumped 3.7 percent in March. As we reported earlier, JANA and Francesco Trapani, the former chief executive officer at Bulgari and a leader in the luxury goods industry, jointly announced a settlement with Tiffany whereby Trapani and two other industry hotshots joined the board of directors. The stock surged nearly 17 percent in February and is up about 22 percent since Jana started buying the stock on January 10.
On the other hand, shares of Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. dropped 4.1 percent last month. In February the drugmaker agreed to add three new directors and repurchase $2 billion worth of stock.
In addition, JANA’s two largest long holdings also lost money last month. Shares of ConAgra Brands, its largest U.S. long position, fell 2.1 percent last month. Even so, the food processing giant is still up nearly 1 percent for the quarter.
HD Supply Holdings, which became the second-largest long holding at year-end, fell 4.3 percent in March. Shares of the industrial distributor declined 3.2 percent for the quarter.
Liberty Broadband Corp., JANA’s third-largest long, returned about 1 percent in March and is up more than 17 percent for the year. Cloud computing specialist Salesforce.com, which JANA got into during the fourth quarter, gained 1.4 percent last month and is now up about 21 percent for the quarter.
