Bruce J. Richards and Louis Hanover co-founded their own investment manager, Marathon Asset Management, back in 1998. The fund, which is oriented towards global credit markets, is based in New York, providing additional offices to its clients in Singapore, and London. At the end of January 2017, Marathon Asset Management held around 15.25 billion in client regulatory assets under management on a discretionary basis and $384.53 million on a non-discretionary basis. The fund’s Chairman and CEO is Bruce Richards, who had 15 years of professional experience in the investment world of Wall Street before co-launching his own hedge fund. During that time he worked at Smith Barney and Donaldson, where he was a Managing Director in the fixed income division, and at Lufkin & Jenrette where he was in charge of the primary investments. He was also employed at Shearson Lehman Hutton, whereas the beginnings of his career were at Pain Webber. Bruce Richards graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. in Economics from Tulane University (and was a member of Phi Beta Kappa).
Before co-founding Marathon Asset Management with Bruce Richards, Louis Hanover, the fund’s current CIO, also worked at Smith Barney as a Managing Director, taking care of all trading operations and risk management in the global emerging markets debt trading sector. Prior to Smith Barney, he was employed at Merrill Lynch, Nomura Securities, First Chicago Capital Markets, and Chicago Board of Trade. Louis Hanover graduated with a B.A. in Economic History from the University of Chicago and an M.B.A. from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.
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Marathon Asset Management relies on several investment strategies to achieve favorable returns for its clients. Those strategies include Emerging Markets, Private Credit, Corporate Credit, Structured Credit, Leveraged Credit, and Real Estate. These strategies rely on crucial bottom-up research ran via separate accounts and combined funds. The fund’s main specialty is “investing in credit dislocations through multiple economic cycles”. Its global credit market operations count emerging markets debt, private credit lending opportunities, distressed debt, and structured credit. Ten years ago, its proficiency was recognized by the US Treasury, which chose it to handle assets for the Public-Private Investment Program together with only eight more investment managers. Speaking of its proficiency and trying to get a better insight into it, we tracked some of its performance figures.
In the last couple of years, its Marathon Partners LP fund had mainly positive return figures. In 2013, it generated a fantastic return of 37.65%, followed by a loss of 0.58% in 2014. One down year didn’t impact the fund’s overall performance much, as it came back on its fet in the following years, delivering 5.86%, and even higher 7.46% in 2016. 2017 was also favorable for the fund, which brought back 13.75%. Last year through October, Marathon Partners LP fund gained 1.01%. Its total return amounted to 1723.79%, for a compound annual return of 14.46%, while its worst drawdown was 34.46.
Its Marathon Securitized Credit fund that utilizes Structured Credit investment strategy brought back 13.3% in 2013, and 8.9% in 2014, and its Marathon Special Opportunity fund that relies on Event-Driven Distressed strategy lost 11.9% in 2015, and gained 17.8% in 2016.
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At the end of the first quarter of 2019, Marathon Asset Management’s equity portfolio was valued $384.01 million, down by 14.66% from one quarter earlier when it had a value of $449.96 million. During the quarter the fund dumped its positions in Corporación América Airports S.A. (NYSE:CAAP) worth $1.42 million on the account of 212,441 shares and Five Point Holdings, LLC (NYSE:FPH), whose 1.17 million shares valued $8.09 million the fund held. The fund didn’t hold a single position in this quarter in one of 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds in Q1 of 2019.
Click here to read the rest of this article, where we present the fund’s biggest positions at the end of March 2019.
Disclosure: None
This article was originally published at Insider Monkey.
