Will Graves’ Boardman Bay Capital Management is a New York-based technology, media, and telecom-focused hedge fund company. This long/short equity management firm is founded back in July 2012. It’s led by its founder and portfolio manager Will Graves and the team of “Silicon Valley and Wall Street veterans,” including Ken Brown, its COO/CFO, Jonathan Bloom, its investment analyst, and Neil Perry, its operational analyst.
Mr. Graves obtained a B.S. from the United States Naval Academy in engineering and political science in 1992 and an MBA from the University of Pennsylvania, The Wharton School in 2000. During his interesting career, for three years he served in the U.S. Navy as a Naval Officer. Prior to that, he campaigned for the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, GA in the Star Class. In the 2000s, he worked as a (strategic and business) consultant in a number of firms, some of them being FireEye/Sequoia Capital, Deloitte, and Touche, etc. For two years, he served as a Director of Strategic Business in Terraspring, until 2002, while the following two years he worked at Sun Microsystems, dealing with business and corporate development. After working in Credit Suisse First Boston for 5 months in 2015, Mr. Graves joined Stark Investments in 2006, where he spent the next four years covering technology, media, and telecom sectors while serving as its Portfolio Manager. Prior to founding his own firm, he served as a Senior portfolio manager in Talpion Fund Management LP.
Boardman Bay Capital Management’s flagship strategy is focused on global TMT sectors. It employs a long/short fundamental strategy. By lаunching its sub-sector funds, the SaaS Opportunity fund and the Optical Opportunities fund Boardman, Bay broaden its investment field to software-as-a-service as well as optical technology companies that way capitalizing on particular growth areas in tech. These are two concentrated and opportunistic hedge fund portfolios that are more and more popular among investors. After all, “there is always a diverse opportunity set within TMT,” as the fund’s founder says, and being “confident that you have a product that’s differentiated” and ready to “to take a very long-term approach” is crucial when striving for excellence and good performance. As of March 2018, Boardman Bay Capital Management managed around $49.43 million of assets of pooled investment vehicles on a discretionary basis.
And while betting on technology companies was a dangerous game in last October, since stock declines resulted in hedge funds suffering losses, Boardman Bay’s recorded positive returns for 2018. However, returns did fluctuate over the last five years. For example, the collapse of tech stocks in 2014 caused some minor losses for the fund, since it invested in Facebook and other tech stocks. Luckily, telecommunications stocks “saved the party,” since the fund actually gained investing in them.
Its Boardman Bay Onshore, LP fund, for instance, did generate an astonishing return of 60.82% back in 2013, however, it lost 2.71 in 2014. In 2015 the fund returned 20.06%, only to have another down year in 2016 when it lost 7.61. In 2017, the fund was back on track returning 7.07%, while in 2018 YTD (October 10, 2018) the returns remained positive being 16.45%. Whereas its total return amounted to 101.50%, and compound annual return was 11.86. Boardman Bay Onshore, LP’s worst drawdown was 19.32. In addition, its Boardman SAAS Opportunities Fund also performed well, since it returned a net 44.97% year-to-date Aug. 31.
Insider Monkey’s flagship strategy identifies the best performing 100 hedge funds at the end of each quarter and invests in their consensus stock picks. This way it is always invested in the best ideas of the best performing hedge funds and is able to generate much higher returns than the market. Last quarter’s 15 long stock picks outperformed the SPY by 7 percentage points. Since its inception in May 2014, our flagship strategy generated a cumulative return of 89%, beating the S&P 500 ETF (SPY) by 29 percentage points (see the details here).
As of December 31, 2018, the value of Boardman Bay Capital Management’s portfolio is $48.63 million, which indicates a $28.87 decrease over its value in the previous quarter. The top 10 holdings constitute 50.03% of the portfolio value. The fund bought 16 new stocks in the recent quarter, and dumped positions in 18 companies, pushing its total down to 44 holdings. The fund likes to invest in stocks that are in many hedge funds’ portfolios, therefore, at the end of Q4 in the fund’s portfolio, there were a few of the most popular stocks among hedge funds. More details about these portfolio changes you can find on the next page.
Speaking of the most popular stocks among hedge funds – at the end of December 2018, Boardman Bay Capital Management had the biggest holding in Amazon Com Inc (NASDAQ:AMZN). The fund’s position in the company, after the fund had increased it by 111%, counted 2,600 shares outstanding, with a value of $3.90 million. Amazon Com Inc (NASDAQ:AMZN) has a market cap of $792.38 billion, and over the past 6 months, its stock lost 14.33%, currently trading at $1,613.64 at a P/E ratio of 80.09.
As of December 31st, the Boardman Bay’s second largest holding, is a newly added position in Walt Disney Co (NYSE:DIS). The fund purchased 33,989 shares outstanding, worth $3.72 million. Walt Disney Co’s (NYSE:DIS) shares were trading at $114.04 per share on February 21st, at a P/E ratio of 15.62. The company has a market cap of $170.01 billion. The fund decided to acquire a new position in Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) as well, by purchasing its 20,500 shares for $2.68 million that way occupying 5.52% of its portfolio. Over the past year, the company’s stock lost 7.67% of its value, currently trading at $160.23. Last month, Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) posted earnings for its fourth quarter and full year 2018, and despite the growing issue regarding company’s privacy practices, it was a strong financial quarter for the company having revenue of $16.91 billion.
During the fourth quarter of 2018, the fund substantially lessened its stakes in Benefitfocus Inc. (NASDAQ:BNFT) and Inphi Corp (NYSE:IPHI), by 60% and 44% respectively. The position in Benefitfocus Inc. (NASDAQ:BNFT), a US provider of cloud-based benefits management platform for consumers, employers, insurance carriers, and brokers occupies 1.41% of the fund’s portfolio since it owns 15,000 of the company’s shares worth $686000. When it comes to Inphi Corp (NYSE:IPHI), a company that provides an analog and mixed signal for the semiconductor solutions for the data center, computing, and communications markets across the globe, the fund holds its 26,900 shares, valued at $865 000, as of December 2018.
Boardman Bay Capital Management lost faith in almost 20% of the companies that were in its portfolio, completely selling out its positions during the fourth quarter of 2018. Among those companies were EMCORE Corp (NASDAQ:EMKR), Coherent, Inc. (NASDAQ:COHR), LendingClub Corp (NYSE:LC), to name a few. The fund sold out 15,000 shares of EMCORE Corp, 1,200 shares of Coherent, Inc., and 82,435 shares of LendingClub Corp.
Disclosure: None
This article was originally published at Insider Monkey.
