David Einhorn Greenlight Capital

David Einhorn

David Einhorn is an American hedge fund manager who recently called for the ouster of Microsoft's Steve Ballmer. David Einhorn was also on the media for his attempt to buy a minority stake in New York Mets baseball club. David Einhorn is the co-founder of Greenlight Capital hedge fund. Einhorn established the hedge fund in 1996 and Greenlight Capital managed to deliver over 20% return annually after fees and expenses. We have been covering David Einhorn and his transactions here frequently. David Einhorn makes his boldest calls at the Ira Sohn Investor Conference. In 2008 David Einhorn said he is shorting Lehman Brothers because of its poor financials. A few months after that call the investment bank went bankrupt and this boosted Einhorn's reputation significantly.

David Einhorn also gave a speech about Allied Capital at the Ira Sohn Conference and that call turned out to be correct after years of struggle. He wrote a book about that adventure: Fooling Some of the People All the Time.

We like David Einhorn. In this year's Ira Sohn Conference David Einhorn picked Microsoft as his target. But this time Einhorn wasn't shorting the stock. In fact David Einhorn bought more of the stock. David Einhorn was asking Steve Ballmer to leave Microsoft. Einhorn said the stock is trading at a significant discount. Since then the stock market declined significantly and Microsoft outperformed the market by more than 10 percentage points.

David Einhorn is a fine hedge fund manager. You can read his entire speech about Microsoft at the following address: David Einhorn. Here is a video clip of David Einhorn:

Visium Asset Management

Visium Asset Management is a healthcare focused hedge fund with an outstanding track record. Its largest positions were in pharmacy companies, drug companies, and health insurance companies. Hedge funds that are focused on a specific sector usually does better than a hedge fund without a specific sector focus.

Here is a recent article from hedgie tracking website Insider Monkey about Visium Asset Management:

Even though Visium Asset Management’s long stock picks performed worse than the market, four of its top five stock picks managed to beat the market. Visium Asset Management also used put options to hedge its exposure. These put positions helped Visium Asset Management to outperform the market since June. We believe investors can outperform the market over the long-term by focusing on Visium Asset Management’s best stock picks.