Anna Nikolayevsky’s Axel Capital Management is a hedge fund advisory firm headquartered in New York City. The firm started its operations in 2002, and it provides services to pooled investment vehicles. Axel Capital earned a Lipper Award for Best North American Long/Short Equity Fund in 2010. In 2015 the fund received the Investor’s Choice awards for Emerging Fund and Emerging Global Equity fund. Anna Nikolayevsky is Axel Capital Chief Investment Officer. Her acuity and leadership are widely recognized in the world of finances. In 2011, Ernst & Young named her one of 50 Leading Women in Hedge Funds. She holds an MBA in Finance from Columbia Business School and a BS from NYU’s Leonard N. Stern School of Business in Economics and International Business. She worked at Goldman Sachs Asset Management as an Analyst responsible for covering autos, semiconductors, software and utilities In the years prior starting her hedge fund; she joined Zweig-DiMenna Associates Inc as an Analyst where her prime focus was tracing and managing long/short equity investments for different industries.
Axel Capital Management employs equity long/short investment strategies. It uses fundamental research with a top-down and bottom-up approach to identify investments in mid to large-cap companies. At the same time, it evaluates each company through corporate filings, checks with suppliers, competitors, and customers. The fund focuses on free cash flow as an indicator of business suitability.
Over the last five years, Axel Capital Management’s investment strategy has proven to be a good one. Despite two down years, the fund has fought its way to generate positive returns. Its Axel Balanced LP fund brought an annual return of 4.55% in 2013. It achieved its best performance in 2014 when the fund attained a brilliant 35.98%. The positive tendency continued in 2015 with 27.49%. However, 2016 was not a good year for Axel Balanced; it brought a loss of 28.32%. The following year, 2017 was not much different, the fund’s return continued on the negative side with a loss of 9.86%. From January through October 2018 it seemed to be back on track, with a positive return of 8.32%. Axel Balanced LP achieved a total return of 35.31% with a compound annual return of 4.31% having it worst drawdown at 39.46%.As disclosed on its Form ADV, on March 27th, 2018 Axel Capital Management held $82.67 million on regulatory assets under management.
Axel Capital’s last reported 13F filing for Q3 of 2018 included a portfolio valued in $112.63 million with 27 positions in it. The fund’s largest holding is Amazon Com Inc (NASDAQ:AMZN) with shares held of 3,900 valued at $7.81 million. This stock equals 6.93% of the firm’s portfolio. The giant online retailer occupies the third position in our list of the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds in Q3 of 2018.
On the next page read more about the interesting changes Axel Capital made to its equity portfolio for this third quarter of 2018.
