Tiger Management

Tiger Management Corp., also known as "The Tiger Fund," was a hedge fund founded by Julian Robertson. The fund began investing in 1980 and was closed in March 2000.

Julian Robertson, a and former United States Navy officer, started Tiger Management in 1980 with $8 million in capital. By 1996, the fund’s assets had increased to $7.2 billion in value.

On April 1, 1996 BusinessWeek carried a cover story written by reporter Gary Weiss, called "Fall of the Wizard", that was critical of Robertson's performance and behavior as founder and manager of Tiger Management. Robertson subsequently sued Weiss and BusinessWeek for $1 billion for defamation. The suit was settled with no money changing hands and BusinessWeek standing by the substance of its reporting.

With $10.5 billion of assets under management in 1997, it was the second largest hedge fund in the world at the time. Its holdings climbed to $22 billion in 1998.

Tiger's largest equity holding at that time was U.S. Airways, whose troubles dragged down the value of his holdings. Such missteps ultimately led him to close his investment company in March 2000 and return all outside capital to investors. Tiger earlier made $2 billion in gains, but then it gave most of them back during a huge one-day move in the yen in 1998. In September 2001, Robertson distributed 24.8 million greatly devalued U.S. Airways shares over to former investors in Tiger. Robertson declared his intent to keep the stock. U.S. Airways declared bankruptcy in 2002, and shareholders in the airline were wiped out.

After closing his Tiger Fund in 2000, Robertson started to use his own capital, experience, and infrastructure to support and finance ("seed") upcoming hedge fund managers. As of September 2009, Robertson has helped launch 38 hedge funds ("Tiger Seeds") in return for a stake in their fund management companies. Apart from those Tiger Seeds, a considerable number of analysts and managers Robertson employed and mentored at Tiger Management went out on their own and are now running some of the best-known hedge fund firms, called "Tiger Cubs", run by Tiger alumni such as Ole Andreas Halvorsen, Chris Shumway, Lee Ainslie, Stephen Mandel, John Griffin, David Gerstenhaber,David Goel, and Paul Touradji.

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