Sandell Asset Management’s Latest Moves

Nina Zdinjak

Sandell Asset Management is an alternative asset manager with a specialty in credit opportunities, global corporate merger arbitrage, and equity special situations. It was founded in 1998 by a renowned Swedish investor and billionaire, Tom Sandell. It provides offices in New York City and London. Tom Sandell cut his teeth at Bear Stearns, where he had an opportunity to work with a famous investment banker Ace Greenberg. He earned a BS in International Business Administration and Economics from Upsala University (Sweden) and an MBA in Finance from Columbia Business School. Today, we are going to take a look at the fund’s latest investment moves.

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Insider Monkey’s flagship strategy identifies the best performing 100 hedge funds at the end of each quarter and invests in their consensus stock picks. This way it is always invested in the best ideas of the best performing hedge funds and is able to generate much higher returns than the market. Since its inception in May 2014, our flagship strategy generated a cumulative return of 103%, beating the S&P 500 ETF (SPY) by nearly 38 percentage points (see the details here). Our best performing hedge funds strategy also returned 26.4% year-to-date and outperformed the S&P 500 Index by nearly 12 percentage points. We take a closer look at hedge funds like Sandell Asset Management in order to identify their best and worst ideas.

At the end of the first quarter of 2019, Sandell Asset Management’s equity portfolio counted 36 long positions, and it carried a value of $564.94 million, down from $905.04 million in the previous quarter. The top new buys in the quarter included positions in Goldcorp Inc. (NYSE:GG), First Data Corporation (NYSE:FDC), Spark Therapeutics, Inc. (NASDAQ:ONCE), and The Ultimate Software Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:ULTI). The fund became more optimistic about some companies in its portfolio, raising its stakes in Worldpay, Inc. (NYSE:WP), Mastercard Incorporated (NYSE:MA), PayPal Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ:PYPL), and Visa Inc. (NYSE:V).

It also lost enthusiasm for some other stocks, lowering its stakes in Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT), Tribune Media Company (NYSE:TRCO), Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT), Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN), and CSX Corporation (NASDAQ:CSX).

Disclosure: None.

This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.