Given all the fun in banking right now, we’d almost forgotten that other corners of finance have also lost an ungodly amount of money recently.
Luckily, the WSJ has managed to tear itself away from blaming AML snafus on women on boards and published a timely reminder yesterday evening:
Tiger Global marked down the value of its investments in private companies by about 33% across its venture-capital funds in 2022, according to people familiar with the firm.
The markdowns erased $23 billion in value from Tiger’s giant holdings of startups around the globe, one of the people said. Its private portfolio includes big bets on hundreds of companies including TikTok parent ByteDance and payments company Stripe. In the fourth quarter, Tiger’s newest venture funds lost between 9% and 25%.
So we can add $23bn to the $18bn aggregate loss that its main hedge fund, long-only and crossover investment vehicles suffered in 2022 to get an approximate overall loss of $41bn (and that’s if you believe the private market marks).
Bloomberg’s Matt Levine is fond of joking that losing a million dollars in finance is a career-destroyer, but losing a billion dollars is cool: it showed you must have nerves of steel and that someone trusted you with that much money. By that measure, Tiger’s Chase Coleman had a phenomenal 2022.
It will be interesting to see how Tiger’s current fundraising campaign goes. The investment manager has already more than halved the target size of its new venture capital fund to $5bn. Failing to hit even that reduced target would be awkward. Given that it is probably light years away from its high-water mark on the hedge fund side it kinda needs the private business to at least bumble along.
On the other hand, Tiger for Plebs — aka ARK Invest — has jumped 25 per cent this year in 2023’s short-covering/flight to shite rally, and even taken in another $155mn in net flows over the past month. ARK for degens — aka the triple-Q ETF — is up 44 per cent, and has sucked in $330mn.
So what do we know?
Further reading:
– RIP the cult of the Tiger cub
– Tiger is suffering one of the biggest hedge fund drawdowns in history
– Tiger Cubs: How Julian Robertson built a hedge fund dynasty
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