A lot of colleagues were on vacation. I just got a treasure trove of hedge fund letters, will be posting information on Monday stay tuned…or follow on Feedburner/email.
From Whitney Tilson:
Our fund rose 12.6% in January vs. 4.5% for the S&P 500, 3.6% for the Dow and 8.1% for the Nasdaq.
On the long side, we had many big winners including Netflix (73.5%), Pep Boys (36.4%, which received a buyout offer yesterday), Goldman Sachs (23.3%), Iridium warrants (22.8%), Resource America (19.7%), J.C. Penney (18.2%), Dell (17.8%), Howard Hughes (17.3%), Citigroup (16.8%), and Microsoft (13.8%). We had no losers of note on the long side other than SanDisk, which declined 6.8% after it gave weak guidance when it reported earnings last week (we took advantage and bought more).
Our short book offset some of our gains thanks to Lululemon (35.3%), Interoil (31.2%), ReachLocal (27.5%), First Solar (25.2%), Green Mountain Coffee Roasters (18.9%), ITT Educational Services (15.8%), and Salesforce.com (15.1%).
Some might say that we have a hot hand so far this year, but this would be incorrect. Our hands have been largely idle, as our portfolio today is nearly identical to the one that did so poorly last year. As we noted in our annual letter, time will tell whether we were wrong or just early on many of our favorite stocks – but the past month has provided some evidence for the latter.
The rest of our letter, in which we discuss Netflix, J.C. Penney, and St. Joe, is embedded below:
