Thursday, February 26, 2009

Timothy Barakett's Atticus Capital Hedge Fund 13F Filing: Q4 2008

This is the 4th Quarter 2008 edition of our ongoing hedge fund portfolio tracking series. Before reading this update, make sure you check out the Hedge Fund 13F filings preface.

Next up, we have Atticus Capital, the hedge fund ran by Timothy Barakett. In 2005, Atticus' funds were up a combined 45%. And, they finished well over 30% for 2006. Barakett founded the firm at age 29 in 1995 and focuses on taking large, concentrated positions in companies. One of Atticus' most famous investments was Phelps Dodge, a miner which was bought out by Freeport McMoran (FCX). At one point, Atticus owned more than 9% of Phelps. Barakett received both his BA in Economics and his MBA from Harvard. Its very evident that Barakett employs macro based investment theses. Once he has decided on what the trend is, he will find the best company within that trend and he will place a big bet. And, when needed, he will step in and take an activist role, ensuring the company is performing to his liking. A fun fact about Barakett is that he was a Harvard hockey teammates with Philip Falcone of Harbinger Capital Partners, whom we also cover.

You may have heard about Atticus over the past year simply because their performance has not been up to par, to put it politely. In a September hedge fund performance update, we noted that Atticus European was -42.5% for 2008 back in September while Atticus Global was -27.2% over the same timeframe. And, consequently, Atticus was a victim of liquidation rumors, which were quickly denied. We previously analyzed Atticus' holdings back in June and noticed that they had significant natural resource and mining positions at the time.

The following were their long equity, note, and options holdings as of December 31st, 2008 as filed with the SEC. We have not detailed the changes to every single position in this update, but we have covered all the major moves. All holdings are common stock unless otherwise denoted.