Viking Global’s Latest Moves

One of the most successful Tiger cubs, Norwegian Andreas Halvorsen founded his own hedge fund in 1999 and named it Viking Global. The fund, which now manages around $28 billion of capital for its clients, provides offices, San Francisco, New York, London, and Hong Kong. Mr. Halvorsen cut his teeth at Morgan Stanley right after his studies and then moved on to Tiger Management. There, he sharpened his investment skills to perfection, working as an analyst and director of equities, and a senior managing director. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts/Science from Williams College and with a Master of Business Administration from Stanford Graduate School of Business. As for the fund’s performance in recent years – 2016 was a challenging one, as its flagship hedge fund lost 4% net of fees, and Mr. Halvorsen decided to part with CIO Daniel Sundheim and return $8 billion to investors. In the following year, the fund recovered bringing back 12% net of fees. In this article, we are going to take a look at Viking Global’s Q1 2019 investment moves.

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 103%, beating the S&P 500 ETF (SPY) by nearly 38 percentage points (see the details here). Our best performing hedge funds strategy also returned 26.4% year-to-date and outperformed the S&P 500 Index by nearly 12 percentage points. We take a closer look at hedge funds like Viking Global in order to identify their best and worst ideas.

At the end of March 2019, Viking Global’s equity portfolio carried a value of $17.44 billion, and it counted 57 long positions. Among the top ones initiated during the quarter were JD.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:JD), NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA), MercadoLibre, Inc. (NASDAQ:MELI), and NXP Semiconductors N.V. (NASDAQ:NXPI). Viking Global also decided to boost its stakes in Anthem, Inc. (NYSE:ANTM), UnitedHealth Group Incorporated (NYSE:UNH), United Technologies Corporation (NYSE:UTX), and Marathon Petroleum Corporation (NYSE:MPC).

As for the stakes the fund completely sold out during the first quarter of 2019, those included salesforce.com, inc. (CRM), T-Mobile US, Inc. (NASDAQ:TMUS), DowDuPont Inc. (NYSE:DWDP), and Raymond James Financial, Inc. (NYSE:RJF). These were the stocks in which Viking Global trimmed its stakes: Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT), Alibaba Group Holding Limited (NYSE:BABA), Netflix, Inc. (NASDAQ:NFLX), and Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN).

Disclosure: None.

This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.