market folly

In a recent 13G filing with the SEC, hedge fund Maverick Capital has disclosed a 16.2% stake in Cardiovascular Systems (CSII) with 2,228,441 aggregate amount beneficially owned. This is a new position for them, as they did not own it when we covered their portfolio just last week.

If you're unfamiliar with Maverick, here's their background: Lee Ainslie started Maverick Capital back in 1993 with $38 million. Nowadays, the fund is worth $4 billion. Ainslie, like many of the other fund managers we've profiled, has a background rooted in learning from legendary great Julian Robertson at Tiger Management. These proteges (nicknamed 'Tiger Cubs') learned from the best and have had great success running their own funds. Some of the other Tiger Cubs include Stephen Mandel's Lone Pine Capital and Andreas Halvorsen's Viking Global. Maverick's strategy is straight up stock picking, both long and short. While they focus on both the long and short sides of the book, they do not employ pairs trades.

They try to hedge their positions like the true definition of a hedge fund. Maverick uses a value approach (obviously learned from Julian) and one of their most popular metrics is finding companies and comparing their enterprise value to sustainable free cash flow. Their Maverick Fund finished -26.2% for 2008, as noted in our year-end hedge fund performance numbers post.

Taken from Google Finance,

Cardiovascular Systems is "a biopharmaceutical company focused on discovering, developing, in-licensing and commercializing anti-infective products. The Company had been developing its product candidate REP3123, an investigational narrow-spectrum antibacterial agent for the treatment of Clostridium difficile (C. difficile) bacteria and C. difficile infection and its other anti-infective programs based on its bacterial deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) replication inhibition technology."