Chopra was once a star junior tennis player in India.
AB Wire
Nehal Chopra, 35, a former star junior tennis player in India, who went on to earn an M.B.A. from Wharton at the age of 21, and became of the few women in the US hedge fund industry to manage more than $1 billion, running Tiger Ratan Capital LP, has seemingly hit failure for the first time in her life: she has lost more than $300 million slammed by the decline in the stock fortunes of Valeant Pharmaceuticals International Inc.
Chopra’s decline in fortunes with her once highly touted hedge fund has been termed by the Wall Street Journal as “one of the swiftest and most severe money-losing streaks in a bruising year for hedge funds.”
Chopra’s Tiger Ratan Capital Fund LP fell about 33% over the past three months, wiping out her gains for 2015 and eating into more than half of last year’s profits, according to investor documents and people familiar with the matter.
Chopra, without warning, recently stopped updating prospective investors on the firm’s performance, reported the Journal. Shares of Valeant have tumbled 43% this year, causing steep trading losses for a number of hedge-fund managers including Lone Pine Capital LLC and William Ackman’s Pershing Square Capital Management LP.
The Valeant position accounted for more than one-fifth of Tiger Ratan’s U.S. stock portfolio in its most recent public filings.
Tiger Ratan is also suffering losses from a bet on European cable conglomerateAltice NV, which as recently as last month was the largest holding in the firm’s portfolio, a person familiar with the matter said, reported the Journal. Altice has been under fire as investors question its ability to acquire Cablevision Systems Corp. in a heavily leveraged deal and its stock has dropped 44.2% over the past three months.
Chopra, after graduating from Wharton worked for Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and later hedge-fund firm Balyasny Asset Management LP.
In 2009 she founded Tiger Ratan, named after the Hindi word for “jewel.” She struck a deal for $25 million from the octogenarian Robertson’s Tiger Management in exchange for splitting some of her future fees. Tiger Management later added even more money and she ran the fund from Tiger’s New York offices until last year, people familiar with the matter said.
By this summer, Ratan had more than $1 billion under management and Chopra was lauded as a rare successful female trader in an industry that has struggled to attract and retain high-level employees with different backgrounds. Investors include New York state’s retirement system, which put in money specifically earmarked for women and minority-run investment firms, reported the Journal.