market folly

Freshly public company Verisk Analytics (VRSK) has at least one major believer as Eric Mindich's hedge fund Eton Park Capital filed a 13G on the company with the SEC. In the filing, Eton Park disclosed that they now have a 7.15% ownership stake with 9 million shares. The filing was made due to activity on October 7th, 2009. This is obviously a brand new position for Eton Park given that shares of VRSK just recently IPO'd. You can view the rest of Eton Park's positions here.

Mindich started the fund back in 2004 with $3 billion under management with a $5 million minimum investment. Nowadays, Eton Park manages over $6 billion. Their investment strategy draws upon Mindich's time at Goldman Sachs where he focused on merger arbitrage. He was so good at his job that he became the youngest partner in Goldman Sachs' history at the age of 27. In addition to merger arbitrage, Eton Park focuses on long/short equity strategies and even invests up to 30% of their portfolio into private investments. Eton Park's solid track record has landed them in our Market Folly portfolio where we seek to replicate hedge fund holdings into a cohesive portfolio. We can do so with the help of Alphaclone and the backtested results are impressive as we've seen 20% annualized returns with our portfolio.

Taken from Google Finance, Verisk Analytics "enables risk-bearing businesses to better understand and manage their risks. The Company provides value to its customers by supplying data that, combined with its analytic methods, creates embedded decision support solutions. It is an aggregator and provider of detailed actuarial and underwriting data pertaining to United States property and casualty (P&C), insurance risks. It offers solutions for detecting fraud in the United Sates P&C insurance, healthcare and mortgage industries, and sophisticated methods to predict and quantify loss in diverse contexts ranging from natural catastrophes to health insurance. It organizes its business in two segments: Risk Assessment and Decision Analytics. It develops solutions, which its customers use to analyze the four key processes in managing risk, in what it defines as the Verisk Risk Analysis Framework: Prediction of Loss, Selection and Pricing of Risk, Detection and Prevention of Fraud, and Quantification of Loss."