Apparently Ruane, Cunniff & Goldbarb
plan to launch a non-transparent, active ETF version of the Sequoia Fund. The expense ratio has not been disclosed.
The current Sequoia team began digging out from under the rubble almost exactly five years ago.
Good news: Ummm ... an opportunity to write nostalgic pieces about The Titan That Once Was?
Bad news: since the new team took over, Sequoia's rank in its 138 fund Lipper Multi-Cap Growth peer group is ...
Annual return: 110th
Sharpe ratio: 111th
Capture ratio (S&P500): 115th
Downside deviation: 97th, that is, 97 have better "bad volatility" scores than Sequoia
Maximum drawdown: 120th
I wonder where else there would be any buzz around the announcement, "hey, guys, we're offering a clone of the 115th best fund in its peer group! Climb abroad"?
David
Comments
If they had remembered, betting on Valeant would have been a 5% blip, not 50%
OF course they are in a not so small group. Bruce Berkowitz immediately comes to mind, Third Avenue Value etc.
If this is a non-transparent ETF, would that mean capacity/size wouldn’t be an issue for smaller cap holdings?
Thanks.
I'll ask Ed on your behalf.
On the capacity question, no. Being an ANT does not reduce any capacity constraints the strategy might otherwise have. That being said, it looks like they're running at $3 billion below their former peak. It appears as if Rolls Royce is their smallest cap name at $12 billion. If that's as small as they want to get, then a rough calculation gives them $18 billion in strategy capacity. (That's based on the assumption that they don't want to own more than 5% of the float for their smallest name, and that each name could represent one-thirtieth of the portfolio.)
David
I'm a little disappointed that this means they won't be able to cap off their fund's assets...if they ever get there. Part of my attraction was the belief they'd curtail their fund size if needed.
That's rough because (1) there can be other constraints on the managers in terms of their internal capacity, (2) part of the strategy capacity can be committed to SMAs or other vehicles, and (3) the managers could choose to underweight their smaller companies. I tend not to make the latter assumption with concentrated go-anywhere portfolios because it's equally likely that they would want to overweight the smallest firm.
When we publish a fund's strategy capacity, it's almost always based on a conversation with the adviser who sometimes (Grandeur Peak) has it down to the dollar and other times, they just laugh and exclaim "as if!"
If you're smallest firm is $100B and you're targeting 50 names, this particular match does give you effectively unlimited strategy capacity: $250 billion or so.
For what that's worth,
David
Since there seems to be keen interest in this fund on this board, do we know what is the max any current manager has invested in the fund? M* says more than a million dollars, which does not impress me as I think that would be less than 1 yr of compensation for each of the managers. M* reports from SAI. I would like to see 3-5 yrs of annual compensation before putting any positive weight on managers’ economic participation. I get that having too much of managers’ wealth could be a detriment too but 3-5 years of annual comp is not too much, given a lot investors put 5-10% of their wealth in a fund.
P.S.: I have never invested in this fund but am open to investing in it, not withstanding its misadventures in 2015-16.
Unless managers with more than $1 million invested in funds publicly reveal a specific amount or threshold, it may be difficult to ascertain this information.
I read this AM the M* analyst report for this fund. M* gives a Neutral rating, only one level above Negative, but gushes over with "[Managers] invest heavily in the strategy alongside fundholders." Who knows what the "heavily" means but hopefully not just the over $1M disclosed in the SAI (SEC filing).
Evidently, the current four managers have been with this fund for at least 10 years, which includes 2015-16.
The above is just an FYI.