A long-short hedge fund firm with ties to Julian Robertson Jr.’s Tiger Management posted a loss in its flagship long-short fund, but notched a notable gain in a long-only fund it debuted in the middle of last year.
Hoplite Capital Management, the New York–based hedge fund firm founded by John Lykouretzos, began trading the Hoplite Long Fund on July 1. It is not known how much money the hedge fund firm raised. However, we do know it returned 6.4 percent last year in its first six months of operation.
Hoplite is the latest among a growing number of hedge fund firms to launch a long-only fund in the past year. It is a curious time to do so, since the bull market will be eight years old this March.
However, many managers and their investors are mindful that the long book at many long-short funds has way outperformed the short book.
In fact, last year Hoplite Partners, Hoplite’s long-short equity fund, lost 3 percent in the fourth quarter, bringing its loss for the year to 6 percent, the latest among a long line of Tiger-related funds to post losses in 2016. Hoplite gained 2.9 percent in 2015 and 4.1 percent the previous year after posting two consecutive double-digit gains.
Hoplite, founded in 2003, can be called a Tiger Cub as well as a Tiger Grandcub.
Before he launched Hoplite, Lykouretzos spent three years as an analyst and portfolio manager at O. Andreas Halvorsen’s Viking Global Investors.
Prior to that, he was an industrials analyst at Robertson’s Tiger Management. He is currently the co-chair of Robertson’s Tiger Foundation. The hedge fund manager kicked off his career at Goldman Sachs, first in the investment banking division and then in the Principal Investment Area.
Hoplite manages $2.8 billion, according to a recent bio of Lykourstzos. At the end of 2015 it had slightly less than $3 billion under management.
At the end of the third quarter, the firm had about $2.2 billion invested in individual U.S. longs, excluding options, according to a regulatory filing. The portfolio included a mixture of economically-sensitive companies and internet titans.
In the fourth quarter, just one of the eight largest positions made money — Regional bank holding company Investors Bancorp rose 16 percent, no doubt benefitting from the late-year rally in financial stocks following the election.
Hoplite’s two largest longs were packaging suppliers. Sealed Air, its largest long, lost 1 percent, while Graphic Packaging dropped 11 percent.
Search giant Google — Hoplite’s third-largest long — was off about 1 percent in the final three months of the year, while social media giant Facebook, its fourth-largest long, was down 10 percent.
