Brilliant achievements
Tiger Management Company has six funds, all of which were founded by Robertson in 1980s and named after various cats. In addition to establishing the Tiger Fund named after its trademark in 1980, the Jaguar Fund and the Puma Fund were established in 1986, and the Lion Cat Fund was also established in 1987. Among them, Tiger Fund and Jaguar Fund are relatively large, each managing billions of dollars. Judging from the name of the fund, people seem to think that Robertson's hedge fund investment strategy is aggressive and offensive.
Previously, Robertson's investment management was extremely successful. As early as 1986, the media widely publicized the high returns of hedge funds, especially the "macro" investment of Tiger Fund 1985. After the strong appreciation of the US dollar for four consecutive years, Tiger Fund expects that the overvaluation of the US dollar against European currencies and Japanese yen will depreciate, and it will buy a large number of foreign currency call options, thus obtaining high returns. In the early days of tiger management, traditional stock selection was an investment strategy. In the middle and late 1980s, with the financial innovation and more and more financial derivatives, Tiger Management increasingly deviated from the traditional fund management strategy, and established a derivative portfolio including national debt, currency, stock market, expected annualized interest rate and related option futures around the world, becoming a typical "macro" hedge fund. Tiger management has always maintained brilliant achievements. From 1980 to1August 1998 before the investment failure, the annual return on investment was 32%, and even counting the 18 months of investment failure, its annual growth rate was as high as 25%, making it one of the best hedge funds.
Suffer failure/frustration
However, after August 1998, the investment managed by Tiger hit a wall everywhere and the asset value plummeted. In the heyday of 65438+1August, 1998, the assets under management amounted to $22 billion, much higher than Soros Quantum Fund. It was the largest hedge fund at that time, so Robertson was promoted to the most influential figure on Wall Street. After a series of investment mistakes, by the end of February 2000, Tiger's assets had plummeted, leaving only more than $6 billion. 1998 since the fourth quarter, investors have successively redeemed their investments in hedge funds under the shadow of the long-term capital management (LTCM) incident. Tiger Management is one of the major hedge funds facing a large number of redemptions, with a total redemption of nearly $7.7 billion.
The decline of tiger management can be traced. First, in the autumn of 1998, due to the devaluation of the Russian ruble, it lost $600 million. Compared with other hedge funds such as LTCM, its losses are not great, especially the Tiger Fund is in its heyday, with losses of hundreds of millions of dollars and limited impact. Secondly, engage in yen speculation, that is, borrow low-interest yen to buy dollar assets, in order to profit from the turmoil in Asian financial markets; However, contrary to expectations, the yen suddenly strengthened in the fourth quarter of 1998, disrupting the deployment of hedge funds to invest in yen, and tiger management eroded billions of dollars. Since then, investors began to redeem their funds, which greatly damaged their vitality.