Fact-Checking With Tiger Global: Apple Inc. (AAPL), Yandex NV (YNDX)

Unlike numerous other hedge fund managers, Tiger Global’s Chase Coleman doesn’t self-advertise. The publicity-shy Coleman has every right to brag about himself, as his funds are amongst the top performers in the hedge fund universe that manage over a billion dollars, according to Bloomberg. Even though it’s never a good idea to follow marquee investment managers blindly, it’s a wise idea to engage in fact-checking with them periodically.

Chase Coleman’s knack for picking out high-potential growth companies, especially in pre-IPO technology companies, is phenomenal and his returns clearly suggest that. Let’s take a look at 5 of his leading technology picks and his possible investment thesis or rationale behind these picks listed on the 13F filing released on Valentine’s Day.

1. Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) : No surprises here, Coleman likes Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL). In fact, it’s his biggest holding with an investment of more than $558 million. Apple’s stock has been hit hard in the last 5-6 months amidst worries about slower pace of innovation and margin compression. In spite of achieving record revenue levels, the stock is languishing near 52 week lows.

The company is under pressure from shareholders and activist investors like Einhorn to return a portion of its $137 billion cash hoard in the form of dividends or a share repurchase. Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL)’s valuation is very attractive and the stock has a decent amount of upside left.

2. Yandex NV (NASDAQ:YNDX) : Coleman has backed the Russian search giant for a while now. He was an early backer of Yandex before the company did its IPO in 2011. Tiger Global holds a stake of $330 million in the ever growing search giant.

Yandex’s top line revenues have been growing rapidly, and its grip on the search engine space in Russia is rock solid with a roughly 62% market share. In addition, the company is making inroads into other growing European countries like Turkey, and expanding into e-payments as well.

Yandex just ousted Bing to claim the title of the fourth largest search engine in the world, with a global market share of more than 2.8%. Coleman thinks that Yandex still has a lot of upside left and it’s pretty clear why.

3. Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) : Tiger Global holds a stake of more than $311 million in the disruptive technology and retail giant. Amazon continues to dominate and disrupt the eCommerce space, while gaining ground in the tablet and e-reader devices market with its line of Kindle and Kindle Fire devices.

In addition, Amazon’s cloud computing arm, Amazon Web Services is a leading cloud computing player, and is expected to grow rapidly in the coming years. Also, Amazon is investing heavily with its wide array of Video offerings, and is now in the process of releasing a number of exclusive and original content shows with Amazon Studios.

4. Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) : Chase Coleman is a believer in Yahoo’s undervaluation and holds a sizable stake of $278 million. And rightly so, with a new management team in place and substantial amounts of share repurchases in the pipeline owing to its partial sale of Alibaba, Yahoo has a lot of upside. Yahoo is slated to do an additional share buy-back of more than $1.5 billion, which should drive the stock higher.