market folly

In an amended 13D filing with the SEC, Chase Coleman's hedge fund Tiger Global is now showing a 14.2% ownership stake in Longtop Financial Technologies (LFT) with 7,293,499 shares. The filing was made due to activity on July 1st, 2009 and signals that they were selling even more shares. Previously, we covered Tiger's LFT sales back in late June. Back then, they had sold down to 7,456,294 shares. And, this time around, with 7,293,499 shares on hand, it's evident that they were still trimming down their position. We'll continue to monitor this development and see if anything else major materializes. In the mean time, you can also check out Tiger's entire portfolio here.

Chase Coleman is yet another 'Tiger Cub,' or manager who learned their trade under the watch of Julian Robertson while at Tiger Management. We track Coleman's Tiger Global due to their strong historical performance and proven fundamental research methodology. In fact, Tiger Global is one of the hedge funds that comprises the Tiger Cub Portfolio created with Alphaclone where you can replicate their positions and enjoy 15.5% annualized returns since 2000. The numbers say it all and Tiger Global's contribution to such a portfolio is one of the many reasons we track them.

We recently ran a profile of Julian (Chase's mentor) and talked about one of his big investment bets as well. Chase attended Williams College and his focus in the markets has always been on smaller cap names and on technology. Although, he has since expanded his horizons with time. An interesting fact about Coleman is that he is a descendant of Peter Stuyvesant, the man who built the wall that gave Wall Street its name. He was clearly born for Wall Street. In 2007, Tiger Global returned 70%, and from 2001-2007, Coleman bolstered an average return of 47%. In terms of recent performance, we saw that Tiger was -12.9% for April and were -8.1% for the year at that time. Their poor performance has been due to pain from their financial and REIT short positions, which they discussed in their quarterly letter.

Taken from Google Finance, Longtop Financial Technologies "together with its subsidiaries, provides a range of software solutions and services to the financial institutions in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), including the development, licensing and support of software solutions, the provision of maintenance, support, and other services, and system integration services related to the procurement and sale of third party hardware and software."