Soroban Capital Partners is an NYC-based hedge fund that was co-founded by Eric W. Mandelblatt, Gaurav Kapadia, and Scott Friendman in 2010 with an initial capital of $130 million. Over the years it had great returns and it has managed to raise its AUM above $11 billion in 2017. Prior to co-founding Soroban Capital Partners, Mandelblatt ran another fund he co-founded with Dinakar Singh, TPG-Axon Management. Before launching TPG-Axon Management, which in the meantime merged with Montrica Investment Management, Mandelblatt cut his teeth at Goldman Sachs as a research analyst covering power and the energy sectors. Later on, he was promoted to Chief Operating Officer of the US Principal Strategies business. He graduated with highest honors with a BS in Accounting and a Certificate of Completion of a BA in Finance from the University of Florida. Around a year ago, Soroban Capital Partners announced it is going to shut down its oldest fund and halve its assets under management in order to devote more energy on a concentrated portfolio, and also that one of its co-founders and co-managers, Gaurav Kapadia is going to leave the firm to form his own family office. In this article, we are going to highlight the fund’s most important first quarter investment moves.
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At the end of the first quarter of 2019, Soroban Capital’s concentrated equity portfolio was valued $5.52 billion and it counted 18 long positions. Among the top new holdings were Altice USA, Inc. (NYSE:ATUS), Lam Research Corporation (NASDAQ:LRCX), Applied Materials, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMAT), and Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOGL). And, the boosted stakes included United Technologies Corporation (NYSE:UTX), NXP Semiconductors N.V. (NASDAQ:NXPI), Qorvo, Inc. (NASDAQ:QRVO), and Marriott International, Inc. (NASDAQ:MAR).
During the first quarter in 2019, Soroban Capital sold out its entire positions in Booking Holdings Inc. (NASDAQ:BKNG), Facebook, Inc. (NASDAQ:FB), Vulcan Materials Company (NYSE:VMC), and Martin Marietta Materials, Inc. (NYSE:MLM). It also trimmed its stakes in Union Pacific Corporation (NYSE:UNP), Norfolk Southern Corporation (NYSE:NSC), and SAP SE (NYSE:SAP).
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This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.