Wall Street investor Julian Robertson, along with several others, helped to bring short selling into the mainstream and helped create the modern hedge fund industry. He died Tuesday at his home in Manhattan. he was 90 years old.
His son Alex said the cause was a heart complication.
Two years before he abruptly closed his prominent investment firm, Tiger Management Corporation, in 2000, Mr. Robertson had about 220 investments in six funds, including various long and short positions in stocks, bonds, commodities and currencies. I was overseeing a billion dollars. around the world.
He continued to manage his multi-billion dollar fortune well into his eighties.
The well-mannered, smartly-tailored North Carolina native is not only an investor champion (he was once hailed as “the best stock picker on the street” on the cover of Business Week), but a number He has also mentored ten hedge fund heirs. His legacy included an independent trader known as the Tiger “Cubs” since he started in his employment, and the budding Tiger “seeds” he helped fund with investments.
“Julian Robertson is one of the few hedge fund managers I admire for the way he spends his money as well as how he makes it,” said George Soros, one of the most prominent of hedge fund pioneers. said in 2016. philanthropy and his investment culture.
James S. Shannos, the famous short-seller who managed the funds of three hedge fund giants in the 1980s — Robertson, Soros and Michael H. Steinhardt — is the author of Sebastian Malaby’s industry history, God In More Money: Hedge Funds and The Making of a New Elite (2010), he says, “If I had to give anyone my money, I would have given it to Robertson.”
The core of Robertson’s investment strategy was to try to eliminate the risk of common market fluctuations by shorting stocks. In other words, you invest on the premise that the company’s stock price will fall. The practice has been employed for centuries, but Mr. Robertson has made it a central element of his trade.
“Our mission is to find and invest in the 200 best companies in the world and to find and short the 200 worst companies in the world,” he explains. , perhaps should be engaged in another business.”
Finding undervalued and overvalued companies was very important, but as Tiger’s stellar performance ballooned his fortune, he traded more often. He finally took into account a wide range of economic and political developments as well. He diversified his commodities and at one point gained the reputation of controlling nearly his annual production of the world supply of palladium, the metal used in automotive catalytic converters.
From Tiger’s founding in 1980 to its wealth peak in 1998, Mr. Robertson generated an average annualized return of 31.7% after fees. It was only in his 4 years that Tiger had a loss in his 21 years.
These returns punctured the so-called efficient market theory, which makes it impossible for market prices to instantly reflect all known information and consistently outperform the market.
Julian Hart Robertson, Jr. was born June 25, 1932 in Salisbury, North Carolina, the son of a textile company executive who he said was descended from Pocahontas. His mother, Blanche, was a local activist whom the mayor called the city’s “biggest cheerleader.”
A mediocre student, but a self-professed “geo freak,” he graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he joined the Reserve Officer Training Corps and served two years in the Navy, traveling the world aboard munitions ships. Did. .
He said he developed leadership skills there when he was put in charge of the ship often on weekends during his time as a lieutenant.
After being discharged from the Navy, “I was very happy to be in North Carolina,” Robertson said in a 2016 interview for this obituary.
However, had he remained, he probably would have run a textile factory. He said that if he wanted to make money, he “his father should go to New York.”
He started as a sales trainee at Kidder, Peabody & Company and worked his way up the ranks of the brokerage firm while building a reputation for finding bargain stocks. But in 1978, tired of the associated marketing chores, Robertson decided to take some kind of long vacation.
He took his wife and two young sons to New Zealand. “I thought he could write a great American novel,” he said in 2016.
The writing project, which he has come to call “narcissistic”, fell apart, and his sister Windham Robertson, a Fortune magazine journalist, persuaded him to abandon it.
But he is in love with New Zealand, which he says has the most expansive geography in the English-speaking world, and after a few years of that love he has built three major resorts in New Zealand and built the country’s spurred the tourism industry.
Buying a 4,800-acre lodge and one golf course site in Kauri Cliffs is like buying a Pebble Beach golf course in California for the price of a modest New York apartment, he said. After opening in 2000, Golfweek magazine named him one of the five best courses in the world.
Back in New York, Robertson left his 22-year career at Kidder, Peabody behind to make his mark on Wall Street by using his own money and $8 million in a friend’s stock to found Tiger Management. Did.
“I was convinced that hedge funds were the way to invest,” he recalls.
Robertson did well, but his performance took a turn for the worse in the mid-1990s in a frenzy over untested dot-com stocks. Investors withdrew, and in 2000 Mr. Robertson became embarrassed, his strategy no longer worked, and closed the shop.
“There is no point in putting investors at risk in a market that I frankly don’t understand,” he told investors.
In his 2004 biography Julian Robertson: The Tiger in the Land of Bulls and Bears, Daniel A. Struckman quoted Mr. Robertson. This “had to buy a lot of company stock to make sense, but there were only a few companies where that was an option,” he added.
Others said Robertson’s autocratic style, increased competition, and heavy losses from speculation in US Airways shares and the Japanese yen contributed to the company’s collapse.
In addition to his son Alex and sister Windham, Mr. Robertson has two sons, Spencer and Julian III, and nine grandchildren. Another sister, Blanche Robertson Bacon, died in 2021.
Among Mr. Robertson’s many philanthropic endeavors are 36 full scholarships that students at the University of North Carolina and Duke University have contributed to each year since 2000. Memorial His Sloan His Kettering’s Josie Robertson Surgery Center and Lincoln Center’s Fountain Square both honor his wife Josephine (Tucker) Robertson, whom he married in 1972 and died in 2010.
While he has sometimes found Robertson to be single-minded and competitive, he said he would be “thrilled” to be remembered for donating his money. He has donated more than $2 billion of his life to charity, according to a statement from his publicist.
Undoubtedly, he argued that “I didn’t want to read in my obituary that ‘he died looking at the yen at 2 a.m.'”