The call:
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For about an hour on November 29th, Mitch Rubin, manager of RiverPark Long/Short Opportunity(RLSFX) fielded questions from Observer readers about his fund’s strategy and its risk-return profile. Nearly 60 people signed up for the call.
The call starts with Morty Schaja, RiverPark’s president, talking about the fund’s genesis and Mr. Rubin talking about its strategy. After that, I posed five questions of Rubin and callers chimed in with another half dozen. I’d like to especially thank Bill Fuller, Jeff Mayer and Richard Falk for the half dozen really sharp, thoughtful questions that they posed during the closing segment.
Highlights of the conversation:
- Rubin believes that many long/short mutual fund managers (as opposed to the hedge fund guys) are too timid about using leverage.
- He believes long/short managers as a group are too skittish. They obsess about short-term macro-events (the fiscal cliff) and dilute their insights by trying to bet for or against industry groups (by shorting ETFs, for example) rather than focusing on identifying the best firms in the best industries.
- RiverPark benefits from having followed many of their holdings for nearly two decades, following their trajectory from promising growth stocks (in which they invested), stodgy mature firms (which they’d sold) and now old firms in challenged industries (which they short).
 The conference call (When you click on the link, the file will load in your browser and will begin playing after it’s partially loaded.)
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The profile:
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All long-short funds have about the same goal: to provide a relatively large fraction of the stock market’s long-term gains with a relatively small fraction of its short-term volatility. They all invest long in what they believe to be the most attractively valued stocks and invest short, that is bet against, the least attractively valued ones. Many managers imagine their long portfolios as “offense” and their short portfolio as “defense.”
That’s the first place where RiverPark stands apart. Mr. Rubin intends to “always play offense.” He believes that RiverPark’s discipline will allow him to make money, “on average and over time,” on both his long and short portfolios.
The Mutual Fund Observer profile of RLSFX, dated August, 2012
The audio profile
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