Mangrove Partners: Performance, AUM, and Holdings

Mangrove Partners is among the best performing hedge funds in previous years. It was symbolically named after a tree species that is extremely resistant, able to bear everything from storms to hurricanes. Correspondingly, Mangrove Partners aims to be tough in the financial markets. It was founded by its current president and portfolio manager, Nathaniel August, who gained valuable investing experience while working as a director at White Eagle Partners, as an Investment Analyst at K Capital Partners, as a Senior Analyst at Brahman Capital Partners, and as an Analyst at Goldman Sachs in the Principal Investment Area. Nathaniel August holds a B.A. from Brown University.

Aside from his vast experience, Mr. August brought something else to his fund – investing genes. Both his parents were money managers; his mother, Nancy, was one of the first female partners in Wellington Management, and his father, Donald was an original partner in Frontier Capital. An inherited passion for investing lead him to start his own fund back in 2010, with only $12 million in AUM.

Mangrove Partners mainly relies on four core strategies: long/short, stressed and distressed, capital structure arbitrage, and liquidations and arbitrage. In the first three years following its inception, Mangrove Partners returned an eye-popping 44% annually. 2014 was also a good year for the fund, as it returned 26.6%, pushing its average annual return to 20.6% between 2012 and 2014. The fund then returned an impressive 50.6% in 2016 to average 23.3% between 2014 and 2016, ending up second among Barron’s top 100 hedge funds in 2017.  As for more recent data, the fund had a return of 8.9% in 2017 and averaged 17.2% between 2015 and 2017, ranking 16th among the top 100 hedge funds in 2018. Currently, Mangrove Partners’ portfolio is valued at $1.55 billion, whereas its recent AUM figures weren’t available.

Insider Monkey’s flagship strategy identifies the best performing 100 hedge funds in our database 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 121% vs. a cumulative gain of 66.6% for the S&P 500 ETF (SPY) (see the details here).

On the next page we’ll check out Mangrove Partners’ most important portfolio moves in the second quarter of 2018.