Roberto Mignone’s Bridger Management has acquired more shares of TrovaGene Inc. (NASDAQ:TROV). In a Form 4 filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Bridger Management has disclosed purchases on July 17th of 140,000 shares at a price of $8.75 per share. Subsequently, the fund currently owns an equity stake in TrovaGene of 3.29 million shares.
Bridger Management is a New York-based hedge fund launched by Roberto Mignone in July 2000. The firm is a long/short equity hedge fund and pursues fundamental, research-oriented stock selection to construct its portfolio. Prior to launching his own shop, Roberto Mignone co-founded Blue Ridge Capital with John Griffin in 1996. Even before that, he had worked at Julian Roberson’s Tiger Management, which consequently puts Mignone’s fund on the list of Tiger Cub hedge funds. When Roberto Mignone stepped down from Blue Ridge Capital to start his own firm, he was joined by the healthcare junior analyst Blake Goodner from that firm. This might partially explain Bridger Management’s high exposure to the healthcare sector, which currently accounts for 47.34% of its public equity portfolio. The hedge fund has been successful in delivering attractive returns throughout its existence, generating an annualized return of 16% net-of-fees since its inception in mid-2007. The fund recorded a loss of 20% amid the financial crisis of 2008, but managed to get back on track in the following years. As stated by its most recent 13F filing, Roberto Mignone’s Bridger Capital manages a public equity portfolio worth $1.50 billion.
Follow Roberto Mignone's Bridger Management
We track hedge funds and prominent investors because our research has shown that historically their stock picks delivered superior risk-adjusted returns. This is especially true in the small-cap space. The 50 most popular large-cap stocks among hedge funds had a monthly alpha of about 6 basis points per month between 1999 and 2012; however the 15 most popular small-cap stocks delivered a monthly alpha of 80 basis points during the same period. This means investors would have generated 10 percentage points of alpha per year simply by imitating hedge funds’ top 15 small-cap ideas. We have been tracking the performance of these stocks since the end of August 2012 in real time and these stocks beat the market by more than 80 percentage points (139.7% return vs. S&P 500’s less than 59% gain) over the last 34 months (see the details here).
TrovaGene Inc. (NASDAQ:TROV) is a molecular diagnostic company that is focused on developing and commercializing its proprietary diagnostic technology for the detection and monitoring of cell-free DNA in urine. To be more detailed, the technology this company is developing detects and quantitates oncogene mutations in cancer patients for better disease management. TrovaGene’s urine-based Precision Cancer MonitoringSM (PCM) platform will serve as the key growth catalyst for the company as soon as it gains adoption and is introduced among clinicians and other institutions. The company is currently engaged in 15 clinical collaborations that intend to evaluate the efficiency of this platform in detecting and monitoring different mutations related to pancreatic, colorectal, and lung cancers, as well as melanoma. It is worth mentioning that the PCM platform has already proven its superiority over tissue biopsy. In April of this year, TrovaGene revealed clinical study results that showed that the PCM platform enables detection of emerging T790M mutations in metastatic lung cancer patients with greater sensitivity than tissue biopsy. It might take quite some time until the company presents and publishes other clinical results for its studies using the PCM platform, but it is quite certain that potential positive results from new studies will surely assist the acceleration of the adoption rate for this technology.
