Magnetar Capital’s Latest Moves

Magnetar Capital is an Evanston, Illinois-based multi-strategy asset manager that was founded in 2005 by Alec Litowitz and Ross Laser, who previously worked at Citadel LLC and Glenwood Capital Partners, respectively. The fund was launched with $1.8 billion, which represented one of the biggest hedge fund initial capitals at the time. At the very beginning, its event-driven investments helped the fund double in size, reaching almost $4 billion in late 2006. Magnetar Capital now provides additional offices in New York City, New York, Houston, Texas, Minneapolis, Minnesota, and London, England. Interestingly, it is named after a neutron star that has a very powerful magnetic field, which makes bursts of energy representing the brightest objects in the universe. Hence, the fund believes the name suits it, as it is the hedge fund that draws professionals and has a lot of passionate energy for investing. In this article, we are going to present Magnetar Capital’s latest investment moves.

Alex Litowitz of Magnetar Capital

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 Magnetar Capital in order to identify their best and worst ideas.

Q1 2019 top new buys for Magnetar Capital counted Worldpay, Inc. (NYSE:WP), Mellanox Technologies, Ltd. (NASDAQ:MLNX), Celgene Corporation (NASDAQ:CELG), Spark Therapeutics, Inc. (NASDAQ:ONCE), and WABCO Holdings Inc. (NYSE:WBC). During the quarter the fund boosted some of its holdings, such as those in First Data Corporation (NYSE:FDC), WellCare Health Plans, Inc. (NYSE:WCG), Elanco Animal Health Incorporated (NYSE:ELAN), and Cigna Corporation (NYSE:CI).

As for the stakes for which the fund seems to lose enthusiasm as it has cut its stakes during Q1 2019 these names come at the top – Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT), Tribune Media Company (NYSE:TRCO), and USG Corporation (NYSE:USG).  Those it has completely sold out include Vectren Corp, Newfield Exploration Co.

Disclosure: None.

This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.