| Andreas Halvorsen |
Andreas Halvorsen’s flagship long-short equity fund, Viking Global Equities, is closing to new investments because its ballooning size is affecting its traditional investment strategy, according to people close to the firm. The fund managed $13.4 billion as of October 31, up 9.6 percent for the year. Part of that increase is because of performance gains: Viking Global Equities has produced a return of 6.6 percent for the year through November 4. The Greenwich, Connecticut, firm manages $14.3 billion overall, an increase in assets of 10.2 percent for the year. The overall assets include those of a long-only fund, which is still open to new capital.
Halvorsen told investors that the firm is finding it harder to short stocks as its assets increase, because the positions often don’t have enough liquidity to accommodate additional capital, according to a person who attended Viking’s recent annual meeting. Viking declined to comment.
Halvorsen, a former Norwegian Navy SEAL, is one of the most successful of the Tiger Cubs — alumni of Julian Robertson’s Tiger Management, where he worked in the 1990s and was, in his last few years, director of global equities. Another alumnus, Chase Coleman of $6.8 billion Tiger Global Management, in his third-quarter letter to investors, expressed similar concerns about the ability to execute his strategy with increasing amounts of capital. “As the Fund’s assets have grown, it has become increasingly difficult to source attractive short opportunities and size them appropriately,” said the letter, according to the website Market Folly.
Viking lost to Tiger Global for the global equity fund of the year honor at the AR Awards in November.
