The hedge-fund manager who embodied an era

Julian robertson was the archetypal hedge-fund supervisor. He had the type of Southern appeal that impressed fierce loyalty and opened the wallets of Wall Avenue titans. He was aggressive, energetic and athletic—briefly, a basic jock—who flew his employees out west on his personal jet for gruelling hikes, mountain climbs and dips in icy lakes.

He based the archetypal hedge fund, too. Mr Robertson picked shares—shopping for corporations he preferred and going brief on these he didn’t. And he was exceptionally good at it. He arrange his fund, Tiger Administration, in 1980 aged 48, with simply $8m. Between then and its peak in 1998 its annual returns averaged 32% after charges (the s&p 500 delivered 13%). By 1998, the fund managed $22bn.

This growth could have been his undoing. Tiger started betting on currencies. In 1998 it misplaced nearly $2bn in a single day when the yen surged in opposition to the greenback. The fund then guess in opposition to the tech increase. It misplaced 19% in 1999 and an additional 14% within the first few months of 2000, earlier than Mr Robertson shut it down.

“I didn’t need my obituary to learn ‘he died getting a quote on the yen’,” he recalled in 2013. So he invested in younger managers, typically former workers. His pawprints are throughout Wall Avenue. A litter of “tiger-cub” funds flourished, and 200-odd hedge funds can hint their roots to him in some kind or one other.

However his loss of life on August twenty third comes because the cubs are struggling. Final 12 months Invoice Hwang blew up Archegos, his household workplace. This 12 months a fund run by Chase Coleman, one other cub, is down by 50% or so. Immediately essentially the most profitable hedge funds are largely run by quants who depend on algorithms not intuition. Mr Robertson was the archetype of an period, however that period has come to an finish.

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