One of the oldest and least-known hedge funds seeded by Julian Robertson, Jr. is off to a strong start this year.
Michael Moriarty’s Teewinot Vista Fund, a long-only fund, was up 23.7 percent through April, according to a private database.
This is the second act for Moriarty, who managed Teewinot Master Fund I from its 2003 launch until 2016, when the long-short fund was shuttered and Vista was launched.
Like its predecessor, Vista’s performance has been volatile, marked by wide annual swings.
Teewinot declined to comment.
Moriarty — who works hard to reveal as little as possible about himself — has been investing for more than 35 years and has had a long close relationship with Robertson, even operating out of Tiger Management’s New York City offices at 101 Park Avenue.
In fact, not only was Moriarty seeded by Robertson in 2003, the Teewinot Master Fund I was included in Tiger Management’s ill-fated Tiger Accelerator Partners back in 2011. The fund of six hedge funds seeded by Robertson also included Cascabel Fund, Long Oar Global Investors, Tiger Eye Master Fund, Tiger Ratan Capital Master Fund, and Tiger Veda Management.
Teewinot stopped managing money for Accelerator Partners in the third quarter of 2016 when the fund was liquidated, and Robertson shut down Accelerator Partners in 2017.
According to the hedge fund database, Teewinot Vista “maintains a strategic relationship” with Robertson while Moriarty “is the second largest investor across the funds.”
Teewinot Runs a Concentrated Portfolio — With Mixed Results
Teewinot Vista Fund runs a globally oriented, concentrated portfolio, based on the belief that “exceptional investment ideas are scarce,” according to a regulatory filing. Teewinot “employs a value orientation to a limited number of sectors undergoing what Teewinot believes will be a secular shift that will unfold globally over a period of years,” per the filing.
The fund is run in a manner consistent with the long side of the previous long-short fund.
It will typically have only about 15 to 25 positions, which is partly to blame for the fund’s volatility.
Since its June 2016 launch, Teewinot Vista has posted double-digit results in three of its four full years — but not all of them were positive. The nearly 43 percent gain in 2019 and better-than 26 percent gain in 2017 were sandwiched around a nearly 24 percent loss in 2018, according to the database. The fund then lost a little more than 1 percent last year.
Teewinot Master Fund I had generated double-digit percentage results in virtually every year of its existence. However, it lost money during at three different years, and in at least two of those years it lost between 35 percent and 40 percent, according to a Teewinot report obtained by Institutional Investor several years ago.
In any case, at the end of the first quarter, Teewinot held 24 different U.S. common stocks. Its foreign listed stocks are not publicly known.
The ADRs of Controladora Vuela Compania de Aviacion, S.A.B. de C.V., a low-cost airline based in Mexico, were by far its largest U.S. listed long. They accounted for more than 20 percent of the U.S. listed portfolio. The firm has held a position in the stock since the fourth quarter of 2013, according to Teewinot’s most recent 13F filing.
Its next three largest positions accounted for nearly one-third of the portfolio: social media giant Facebook, ADRs of low-cost airline Ryanair Holdings, and streaming giant Netflix.
In the first quarter Teewinot established a new position in auto giant General Motors, now its sixth-largest U.S. long bet.
