Phil Hempleman’s Ardsley Partners’ Returns, AUM and Holdings

Being an expert in long-short equity and global macro investing, Ardsley Partners employs four investment strategies. The long-biased flagship strategy is used for investments in US-based life sciences, energy, telecom, technology, and alternative energy companies. It uses a concentrated book approach with the fund’s top core holdings which represent 40-50% of its portfolio. The second one is renewable energy-clean tech strategy utilized when investing in companies in the renewable energy sector. It seeks to identify symmetric risk-reward opportunities across all market capitalizations on a global level.

The third strategy is built around healthcare sub-sectors and related areas, and it’s a long-short equity strategy which combines bottom-up analysis with different factors that impact the industry, to gain absolute returns while maintaining low volatility. Finally, the fourth one is focused on the technology sector, and it’s a global long-short equity strategy that’s backed up with fundamental research with the goal of producing impeccable returns while retaining low volatility.

And now, let’s take a closer look at its Ardsley Partners Renewable Energy Fund’s returns over the last five years. The year 2013 was promising since the fund returned 27.67%. However, the years 2014 and 2015 brought some major setbacks, since the fund lost 0.01% and 4.40%, respectively. Luckily, it got back on track in 2016 when it returned 10.51%, followed by 2017 returns of 13.17%. Although the fund’s returns had fallen back to 7.84% from January to October 31, 2018, they remained positive. Its total return was 200.28% for a compound annual return of 9.39%, while its worst drawdown amounted to 59.34. As of March 2018, the fund had around 895 million in regulatory assets under management, managed on a discretionary basis.

Insider Monkey’s flagship strategy identifies the best performing 100 hedge funds at the end of each quarter and invests in their consensus stock picks. This way it is always invested in the best ideas of the best performing hedge funds and is able to generate much higher returns than the market. Since its inception in May 2014, our flagship strategy generated a cumulative return of 96.9%, beating the S&P 500 ETF (SPY) by over 40 percentage points (see the details here).

According to Ardsley Partners’ latest 13F filing with the SEC, the fund’s 13F portfolio was valued at around $742 million after adding 62 new positions and dumping 61 companies, pushing its total down to 151 holdings. Among the positions the fund held at the end of Q3 was the position in Microsoft Corp (MSFT), as well as the position in Adobe Inc. (ADBE) which also found a place among the 30 Stocks Billionaires Are Crazy About. And, while Philip Hempleman still isn’t the “member of the three-comma club,” at the end of Q3 his fund owned 219,000 and 34,500 of the companies’ shares worth $25.04 and $9.31 million, respectively.

You can find out more about some of the biggest changes the fund made to its portfolio in the last quarter on the next page.

First, let’s breeze through some of the Ardsley Partners’ new positions at the end of Q3. The fund initiated a fresh stake in Magnolia Oil & Gas Corp (NYSE:MGY), an oil and gas exploration and production company, buying 975,000 of its shares worth $14.62 million. By occupying 1.97% of the fund’s portfolio, it’s one of the top 20 largest positions held by the fund as of September 30th. The fund also walked into a new position in one of the largest homebuilders in North America, Skyline Champion Corp (NYSE:SKY), acquiring 200,000 shares of the company valued at $5.71 million. According to our latest research, the hedge fund interest in this stock is skyrocketing.

Some of the other big positions Ardsley Partners held during the third quarter were in Sunopta Inc (NASDAQ:STKL), a Canada-headquartered, multi-national food and mineral company, and Sunrun Inc. (NASDAQ:RUN), a California-based provider of residential solar electricity. When it comes to Sunopta Inc. (NASDAQ:STKL) the third largest fund’s holding, the fund increased its stake in the company by 49% percent to 4,414,229 shares valued $32.44 million. When it comes to Sunrun Inc. (NASDAQ:RUN), although the fund decided to raise its stake in the company by only 5% to 2,020,000 shares worth $25.12 million. Nevertheless, it’s still among top ten largest Ardsley Partners’ holdings occupying 3.38% of its portfolio.

It seems that the fund is quite optimistic when it comes to Amyris Inc. (NASDAQ:AMRS) since it boosted its stake in the company by an astonishing 1780%. The fund purchased 2,349,867 shares of a renewable products company, worth $18.65 million. In addition, it’s the company in which the fund increased its stake the most during the third quarter. On the contrary,  the fund is starting to turn its back to 8X8 Inc (NYSE:EGHT), a provider of cloud communications and customer engagement solutions, at least according to its latest 13F filing with the SEC. The fund decreased its stake in the company by 94% to 15,000 shares valued at $319 000.

In the meantime it appears that Ardsley Partners is losing interest in some of its other holdings. For instance, some of the biggest positions the fund decided to completely sell during the third quarter were in Aimmune Therapeutics Inc. (NASDAQ:AIMT) whose 7,500 shares the fund previously held and Bed Bath & Beyond Inc. (NASDAQ:BBBY), to whose 10,000 shares the fund said goodbye to.

Disclosure: None. This article was originally published at Insider Monkey.