February 2025 Recap

At OWL, we track publicly disclosed equity positions of leading fund managers across more than 60 countries. OWL users can track daily performance estimates, risk and return metrics, exposure changes, and more for thousands of managers on our platform. 

We also have “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 monitor groups of managers and their underlying disclosed holdings directly on the OWL platform. The table below shows how the publicly disclosed equity holdings of these groups performed during February.   

Several groups of international managers performed the best in February, including Japan, China, and EM-focused managers. REIT-focused managers also performed well, while India and Growth-focused managers fared the worst.

For our customers, we also provide a detailed table with a selection of the best and worst performing managers in February, using OWL's return estimates. One example of a top performing fund in February was Brilliance Capital. Brilliance was founded by Lin Shi in March 2013, after he spent several years as an analyst at Hillhouse. Brilliance runs a long/short strategy across the Greater China markets, investing primarily in technology, consumer goods, and healthcare. The Skoll Foundation has been one of Brilliance’s LPs, but significantly decreased its investment with the manager between 2021-2023, according to disclosures. 

Over the past decade, Brilliance’s AUM and disclosed positions have experienced large ups and downs. Brilliance’s regulatory AUM peaked in late 2021 at $4.8 billion:

While the fund’s disclosed positions have outperformed Chinese benchmarks since inception, the 2021 AUM peak coincides with a peak in estimated performance:

As we’ve previously written about, OWL keeps track of spinouts from large firms like Hillhouse. Though not as pronounced as Brilliance, several other Hillhouse spinouts have seen similar drawdowns in AUM across recent years, including Franchise Capital, Coreview, and Octagon. OWL users can track the full list of over 450 former Hillhouse employees, and where they work now, using our “former employees” feature. If you’d like to learn more about how to track spinouts using OWL data, reach out to us!

Other News & Events

• Article on University of Nebraska CIO paring back international exposure

• Article on Hillhouse hiring PEPSICO’s Asia-Pacific CEO to run global consumer team

• Podcast with Elliott Capital’s Paul Singer

• Article on MIT’s participation in Bitwise’s $70 million equity raise

• Study from Commonfund on the increase in private schools using OCIOs

• Article on Tybourne returning capital in long-only funds

• Article on Oxford’s endowment taking a minority stake in Osmosis

• Howard Hughes Medical Institute is hiring an Investment Associate

• Commonfund is hiring an E&F Portfolio Manager\Mass General Brigham is hiring an Investment Director

• Lilly is hiring a Senior Director of Public Market Investments

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.