Big Bets On Internet Companies Put Chase Coleman Up 34.5 Percent

Chase Coleman is beating most hedge fund managers so far this year and is off to one of his best years.

The Tiger Seed was up a whopping 9 percent in June and is now up 34.5 percent year-to-date, according to investors.

Coleman has been making big bets on Internet companies, a number of them privately-held. Among his most celebrated stakes are in Facebook and LinkedIn.

He also reportedly paid $10 million for a 40 percent position in Anywayanyday.com, a Russian internet ticket booking website.

Private equity-like investments are said to slightly above 10 percent of the fund. In fact, in February he reported to the Securities and Exchange Commission that he had met his goal of raising $1.25 billion for Tiger Global Private Investment Partners VI, L.P., his sixth venture capital fund.

On Thursday, Coleman disclosed he has a 5.88 percent stake in Homeaway, which runs online services for vacation rental properties. On June 28 it went public at $27 per share. It closed Thursday at $41.01.

On June 30, he disclosed that on June 20 he raised his stake to 7.3 percent in Bitauto Holdings Ltd., which provides Internet content for the auto industry in China. Good timing. The stock bottomed at $6.74 that day and now trades at $7.54, a nearly 12 percent gain. Even before the recent purchase, Tiger Global was the largest shareholder.

Also in June he raised his stake in online travel company MakeMyTrip Ltd., by roughly 50 percent, to 16.9 percent. He was already the largest shareholder before the recent purchases.

One investor in his fund says this heavy Internet exposure is “a little concerning,” but concedes you must brace for some inevitable downward volatility sometime this year. Still his large gains so far provide some cushion for a potential drawdown, the investor stresses.

Coleman is clearly the most successful of the Tiger Seed breed, those managers who were staked personally by Tiger Management founder Julian Robertson. Coleman came from old money. He grew up Charles Payson Coleman III in tony Old Brookville on Long Island’s North Shore and is a descendant of Peter Stuyvesant, the last Dutch governor of New York who built the 'wall' on Wall Street. His 2005 wedding at Bethesda-by-the-Sea in Palm Beach, Fla., which was attended by 370 people, was featured in the society pages.

Coleman joined Julian Robertson’s Tiger Management as a technology analyst after graduating from Williams College with an economics degree in 1997. In 2001 he started Tiger Technology — now called Tiger Global — a long/short equity fund that was one of the first hedge funds seeded by Robertson, who retained an equity interest in the fund.

Coleman was the youngest of the group at the time.

By the end of 2007, Tiger Global, had grown to more than $6 billion, with a seven-year annualized return of about 44 percent.

However, he dropped 26 percent in 2008 and 1 percent in 2009, before rebounding in 2010, climbing 18 percent.

He'll be betting that this Internet boom does not end as ugly as the one in 2000.