(Excluding debt, it had $95 billion.) A year earlier, Tiger Global’s hedge fund had topped a widely followed industry performance list - making some $10.4 billion for investors during the pandemic year of 2020, when its tech bets skyrocketed. Including the debt it employed, it was managing about $125 billion with an investment staff of 52 people, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Coleman could not quite match Julian Robertson’s legendary status (which is also derived from some 200 hedge funds that trace their roots back to him), but he built a firm much larger than his mentor’s flagship Tiger Management - and made a lot more money.Īt the end of last year, Tiger Global had become one of the biggest firms of its kind - it operates a hedge fund, a long-only fund, and several venture-capital funds - in the world. Whatever initial misgivings early investors may have had about Coleman, over the next two decades, he put up double-digit returns annually and became heralded as a wunderkind. He married well too: His wife, Stephanie Ercklentz, starred in the 2003 documentary Born Rich along with Ivanka Trump.Ĭhase Coleman’s wife, Stephanie Ercklentz, starred in the 2003 documentary Born Rich along with Ivanka Trump. Raised on Long Island’s tony North Shore, Coleman attended the prestigious Deerfield Academy, like his father before him, before going to Williams College. A true American blue blood, he is a descendent of Peter Stuyvesant, the last Dutch governor of New York. Like many of Robertson’s protégés, now known in the industry as Tiger cubs, Coleman was a child of privilege. When Robertson closed up shop, Coleman and a number of his co-workers decided to leverage Tiger Management’s cachet (and money) and launch their own hedge funds. Robertson throwing in the towel now looks like a perfect indicator of the dot-com madness peaking: He did so in the very month the tech-heavy Nasdaq index set an all-time high that it wouldn’t touch again for more than a decade. “There is no point in subjecting our investors to risk in a market which I frankly do not understand,” Robertson said in March 2000, as he announced he would return to investors what was left of their money. Legendary hedge-fund manager Julian Robertson helped Coleman get Tiger Global off the ground. He shut down Tiger Management in 2000 after losing several billion dollars betting against the hype. Robertson was defeated by the dot-com mania of the late ’90s - he could never bring himself to buy into the bubble. Robertson, a Wall Street titan often mentioned in the same breath with fellow hedge-funder George Soros, also has a place on that list of big losses after suffering a tough streak at the end of an otherwise brilliant career. Long Term Capital Management, the most notorious hedge-fund blowup of all time, shed a mere $4.6 billion when it almost collapsed in 1998. Tiger Global’s drubbing far surpasses that of Bridgewater Associates, the world’s largest hedge fund, which lost $12 billion in 2020, or Melvin Capital Management, the now-infamous target of the Redditor-led short squeeze of GameStop shares in 2021, which cost it $6.8 billion. “Their losses look to be the biggest in the history of hedge funds,” says one hedge-fund manager, ticking off other notable contenders for that unfortunate title. The meltdown at Coleman’s firm, named Tiger Global in a nod to his mentor, is one for the ages. The guy who started as a shy analyst would put up impressive gains for years, then suffer mind-boggling losses: $25 billion (and counting) as of June, a record figure even in the lofty world of hedge funds. What this investor could not have imagined is that the geeky tech analyst would one day run one of the world’s largest private-investment firms and that he would also become both a central player in a frenzied years-long global tech bubble - one driven by “unicorn” companies trading at absurd valuations - and its bursting over the past six months. “He didn’t look you in the eye,” recalls an investor who says he had to wonder, Was Coleman really talented, or was Robertson’s support just because of the personal connection? The 25-year-old analyst, who had worked at Robertson’s storied Tiger Management and was a close friend of his son’s, seemed shy and insecure. When legendary hedge-fund manager Julian Robertson decided to give Charles Payne “Chase” Coleman III $25 million to start his own fund in 2001, potential investors meeting Coleman for the first time were skeptical.
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