Is Ken Griffin’s Wife Good at Stock Picking?

Anne Dias Griffin, Ken Griffin’s wife, has been managing a hedge fund since 2001 but she stopped filing 13F forms last year. She founded Aragon Global Management with seed capital from Julian Robertson. Prior to founding Aragon, Anne Dias Griffin was an analyst at Andreas Halvorsen’s Viking Global (Halvorsen is a “Tiger cub”) and before that she was a portfolio manager at George Soros’ hedge fund. Anne Dias also worked at Goldman Sachs as an analyst.

As you can see she has a very good resume. We wonder how her last publicly available stock picks performed. The last quarter Anne Dias Griffin filed a 13F form was 2010’s third quarter. It’s almost been a year. How have her stock picks performed?

Unfortunately her last public 13F portfolio didn’t perform much better than the entire market. In fact during the last quarter of 2010, her stock picks underperformed the S&P 500 index by 6 percentage points. Her stocks closed the gap during the first half of 2011. By the end of June her portfolio was only 0.1 percentage points behind the S&P 500 index. The main reason for her mediocre performance is her foreign banking stock picks. She had BBD, HDB, and ITUB. Her investments in these stocks lost 2% at a time when the broader market went up by 20%.

Griffin’s best stock pick was Silver ETF (SLV) and worst stock pick was VXX. VXX was probably a short-term hedge against further declines in stock market last fall. The stock is really a terrible long term play.