Norwegian Ole Andreas Halvorsen (60), originally from Borge outside Fredrikstad, manages and manages the hedge fund Viking Global Investors from the state of Connecticut north of New York. Halvorsen is known as one of the industry’s best stock pickers, and is the world’s 421st richest with a personal fortune of around NOK 56 billion, according to Forbes.
In 2021, however, Halvorsen went on a real bang with the fund Viking Global Equities, which received a negative return of 4.5 percent. In comparison, the broad S&P 500 index rose around 27 percent.
Halvorsen very rarely gives interviews, and has not commented publicly on the disappointing result, but in a letter to the fund’s investors he makes an attempt to explain where it went wrong, writes Bloomberg.
In the letter, he writes that the decline is primarily due to the fact that he underestimated the pandemic effects, more specifically how long they would last. Among other things, the fund bet that consumption would normalize and rotate back from goods to services, which has proven to take longer than expected.
“In retrospect, this was a failed bet,” Halvorsen wrote in the letter.
“We have maintained our position and believe that companies that profit from reopening will benefit from both an improvement in fundamentals and a reassessment of multiples,” Halvorsen continued.
