market folly

Due to activity on March 25th, 2010 Stephen Mandel's hedge fund Lone Pine Capital filed a 13G with the SEC regarding shares of Longtop Financial Technologies (LFT). In the filing, we see that they now have a 5.5% ownership stake in LFT with 3,093,594 shares (via the ADR shares traded on the NYSE). This is a brand new position for them as they previously did not own shares when we looked at Lone Pine's portfolio.

It seems Mandel's hedge fund has been busy as of late because just yesterday we noted that Lone Pine started a new Live Nation Entertainment (LYV) stake. Yet, their newly initiated LFT position is intriguing because we've seen fellow Tiger Cub hedge funds active in this stock. Lee Ainslie's Maverick Capital started a new LFT position in the fourth quarter. At the same time, Chase Coleman's Tiger Global has been slowly selling shares of LFT and we've taken note of this several times. More often than not, you'll see Tiger Cub hedge funds share similar positions in their portfolios, so this is one of the somewhat rare occurrences when there is a divergence of opinion. That said, Coleman's hedge fund could merely have been reducing their position size as they still own LFT as far as we're aware. We'll have to see if any other funds begin adding shares.

For 2009, Lone Pine's main fund Lone Cypress was up 17.7% as noted in our hedge fund performance numbers post. Additionally, their Lone Kauri was up 12.1%, Lone Cascade up 44.4%, and Lone Dragon Pine up 72.9%. For other investment ideas from Mandel's hedge fund, we previously saw that they are bullish on education plays as well.

Taken from Google Finance, Longtop Financial Technologies is "ogether 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."