Money Stuff
Who had a good year?
Today there are a lot of articles looking back at the best-performing asset managers in 2015, and it is an illuminating and bewildering experience to read them all at once. How did they do it? Well: "Her secret is no secret at all: faith in retail companies and the time-tested principles of value investing," writes Matthew Winkler at Bloomberg View about Deena Friedman, the top-performing equity mutual fund manager. (Gabriel Plotkin’s Melvin Capital is the top-performing hedge fund identified in this DealBook article ; Plotkin is also focused on the consumer industry.)
"Those who did well defied conventional wisdom," writes Rob Copeland about the top hedge fund managers, including John Armitage of Egerton Capital (bearish on oil) and Lee Ainslie of Maverick Capital (bearish on Apple). (The DealBook article also points out that a lot of "hedge fund hotels," including SunEdison, Williams, Cheniere and Valeant, had terrible years.)
"Our goal is to pick the safest securities in the market," says Tom Price of the Wells Fargo Short-Term High Yield Bond Fund, the best-performing high-yield fund in 2015 (up 2 percent!), "which has lagged behind the market in each of the previous six years."
"We took a leap of faith because we knew how much potential there was in e-commerce," says Anindya Chatterjee of the City National Rochdale Emerging Markets Fund, the best-performing emerging-markets stock fund, about his decision to invest in Tencent Holdings "even though it was not clear to him where the company’s profit growth would come from."
So betting on the consumer, and betting against the consumer, worked. Following time-tested principles worked, as did defying conventional wisdom. Focusing on safety worked, as did leaps of faith. The thing that didn’t work for six years worked in the seventh. […]
