Julian Robertson is one of the most scrutinized investors on Wall Street, even though he closed his Tiger Management fund back in 2000. Even though Tiger Management is currently responsible for Robertson’s own wealth, it still makes headlines from time to time and its returns are closely watched. For example, in 2008 Robertson scored a 150% return on his $200 million personal account, according to Forbes. We at Insider Monkey also backtested the performance of Robertson’s equity portfolio as reported in Tiger Management’s 13F filings. According to our calculations, between 2009 and 2012, the fund’s top five large-cap positions (in companies worth over $20 billion) generated an average gain of 1.63% per month, underperforming the S&P 500, which appreciated by a monthly 1.72% in the same period.
At the end of September, Tiger Management’s 13F portfolio was worth $423.32 million, according to its latest filing, and the fund was mainly invested in Technology, Healthcare and Financial stocks. In this article, we are going to take a look at five of Julian Robertson’s holdings in large-cap stocks. The companies in question are Celgene Corporation (NASDAQ:CELG), Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT), Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG), Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB), and Priceline Group Inc (NASDAQ:PCLN).
At Insider Monkey, we’ve developed an investment strategy that has delivered market-beating returns over the past 12 months. Our strategy identifies the 100 best-performing funds of the previous quarter from among the collection of 700+ successful funds that we track in our database, which we accomplish using our returns methodology. We then study the portfolios of those 100 funds using the latest 13F data to uncover the 30 most popular mid-cap stocks (market caps of between $1 billion and $10 billion) among them to hold until the next filing period. This strategy delivered 18% gains over the past 12 months, more than doubling the 8% returns enjoyed by the S&P 500 ETFs (see more details).
Let’s start with Celgene Corporation (NASDAQ:CELG), in which Robertson’s fund held 368,940 shares worth $38.57 million at the end of September. Robertson was one of the nine billionaires whose funds we track that were bullish on Celgene heading into the fourth quarter. Overall, 67 funds in our database held roughly $2.57 billion worth of Celgene’s stock, compared to 68 funds with stakes worth $1.94 billion a quarter earlier. Robertson initiated a stake in Celgene during the first quarter of 2016 and has seen the stock gain 4% between April and September, although year-to-date the stock is close to flat. One of Celgene Corporation (NASDAQ:CELG)’s most promising candidates is GED-0301, for the treatment of Crohn’s disease. In October, the company announced that its Phase 1b study of GED-0301 showed promising results, with a clinical response rate of 67% and a 48% remission rate. Earlier this month, Celgene acquired Acetylon Pharmaceuticals, a Boston-based biopharmaceutical company that is engaged in the development of small molecule histone deacetylase (HDAC) inhibitors; one of its lead product candidates is developed for the treatment of blood cancer and solid tumors.
