April 2025 Recap + Berkshire Winners

April 2025 Recap

In April, Brazil managers continued their strong 2025 performance, with Europe-focused managers also having a good month. Growth and Biotech managers improved in April after a tough start to the year. Energy/cyclicals and REITs underperformed, followed by China and Financials managers. For our customers, we also provide a detailed table with a selection of the best and worst performing managers in April, using OWL's return estimates.

As a reminder, the table below is based on our “OWL Groups” – curated lists of over 500 managers frequently found in leading allocators’ portfolios. These lists are categorized by geography, sector, and style, enabling our users to easily monitor groups of managers and their underlying disclosed holdings.

Berkshire Winners

In honor of one of our favorite weekends of the year (Berkshire Annual Meeting), we utilized OWL’s ownership database to look for Berkshire owners with particularly long and profitable positions in the stock. OWL’s data goes back to late 1999, so we’re surely missing many with large gains before that time. The table below shows a selection of these “Berkshire Winners”:

In addition to GEM, we’ve also noticed several other endowments with positions in Berkshire in recent years, including Georgetown (which has a successful direct public equity program) and Northwestern.

OWL users can see stock-level profit estimates like the ones above for thousands of managers on the platform. As an example, the table below shows the most profitable positions (both current and former) for Punch Card, a long-term, concentrated fund run by Norbert Lou.

Users can also see this calculated as a “batting average” for each manager:

Other News/Events

• Podcast with Cliff Sosin: Investing in Carvana

• Podcast with Roelof Botha (Sequoia Capital): Lessons from 20 Years of Venture Capital

• Activist Irenic Capital builds Couchbase stake

• Table of April Hedge Fund Returns

• Multistrategy Hedge Funds Turn a Rocky April Into More Gains

• Walton family office Builders Vision names sole CIO

• Tiger Global-backed Urban Company plans IPO

• Cevian Capital's strategy foiled due to Baloise-Helvetia deal

• University of Michigan Hiring Principal Investment Professional

   

About Old Well Labs

OWL is an intelligence platform built for allocators, by allocators. Leading endowments, foundations, and family offices use the system to find, monitor, and connect with thousands of fund managers globally. OWL's analytics engine has collected over one billion data points from 65 countries. We make it easy for allocators to find and track information about the managers they care about – not just positions but also performance analytics, people data, business information, and details about the manager investments of other allocators.

Disclaimers

Returns represent the return on invested capital of publicly disclosed long positions, as calculated by OWL. Actual returns may vary based on a number of factors, including (but not limited to) undisclosed positions, short exposure, non-equity holdings, cash holdings, and lagged disclosure of positions.

This newsletter and the material on the Old Well Labs platform are for informational purposes only and should not be considered investment advice or a recommendation of any particular security, manager, or strategy. Old Well Labs shall not be liable for any investment gain or loss that may occur from the use of this material. No part of this material may be reproduced in any form or used in any publication without express written permission from Old Well Labs.