March 2026 Recap

Managers in OWL’s Energy and Cyclicals group saw their holdings perform well in March, putting them on a 3-month streak as the best performing group this year. March was a tough month for most other manager groups with the next best performance coming from Biotech at -0.7%.

India continues to underperform other groups and notched its worst month so far this year while the Europe, Global, and Growth groups continue their more recent downturns after positive performances in January.

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. All returns shown are estimates based on publicly disclosed holdings.

Fairmount Funds

For our users, last Friday’s newsletter included a list of managers that had the best and worst estimated performance in March. One of March’s best performers was Fairmount Funds, a Philadelphia-based investor focused on biotech and life sciences.

Fairmount was founded in 2016 by Peter Harwin and Tomas Kiselak. Harwin previously spent eight years at Boxer Capital, while Kiselak previously spent over five years as a managing director at RA Capital Management.

Both co-founders also serve on the board of directors of Paragon Therapeutics, a biologics discovery firm that Fairmount founded in 2021 to discover and develop therapies to later be acquired by large biotechnology and life sciences companies.

Paragon has been a fruitful endeavor for Fairmount, leading to seven individual company launches since its inception, according to a press release from this past Wednesday detailing the latest spinout Korsana Biosciences’s merger with Cyclerion Therapeutics, a public biotech company. In concurrence with the merger, a private investment round of $380 million was announced led by Fairmount and Venrock Healthcare Capital Partners.

Fairmount’s more recent estimated performance appears to be driven by some of its larger disclosed positions in Spyre Therapeutics (+19% in March), Oruka Therapeutics (+46% in March), Dianthus Therapeutics (+52% in March), and Enliven Therapeutics (+33% in March).

Altogether, those four positions make up over 50% of Fairmount’s disclosed portfolio. Spyre and Oruka are designated partners of Paragon, and Fairmount also holds meaningful positions in the three remaining partner companies – Apogee Therapeutics, Jade Biosciences, and Crescent Biopharma.

Fairmount invested in several of the aforementioned companies before they went public as well, as shown by OWL’s new private holdings data. Users can easily see which of each company’s rounds Fairmount participated in, as demonstrated by the funding history page for Apogee Therapeutics.

Cogent Biosciences

Fairmount’s largest disclosed position as of 3/31 was in Cogent Biosciences, which is also the fund’s position with the highest estimated return on invested capital of nearly 350%. That said, Cogent did not contribute to the manager’s March performance as it is down roughly 2% in March and 1% YTD.

Cogent first went public under the name Unum Therapeutics in March 2018 and rose quickly before reversing course and dropping substantially. The fall of Unum’s stock price is largely attributed to repeated issues that arose during its Phase 1 trials of its ACTR087 cancer therapy.

The company’s troubles led to the FDA placing a clinical hold on Unum’s cancer treatment trials in June 2019 due to severe patient adverse events, causing the stock to continue its slide culminating in an all-time low price of $1.18 by June 2020.

On July 6th, 2020 Unum announced that it would be acquiring cancer treatment development company Kiq, driving the share price up to around $13 within days. In concurrence with the acquisition, Unum announced a private placement led by Fairmount resulting in gross proceeds of approximately $104.4 million.

Unum also announced a few months later that it would be changing its name to Cogent Biosciences and pivoting away from cell therapies entirely in favor of precision kinase inhibitors, Kiq’s primary specialty.

The private placement was Fairmount’s first buy of Cogent and it continued adding to its position as Cogent’s share price bounced around between $4 and $16 for the next five and a half years before rising sharply in November 2025 to peak at over $40 following the news that the FDA had granted its new gastrointestinal stromal tumors treatment a breakthrough therapy designation. Fairmount then nearly halved its position in January 2026, locking in substantial profits.

Fairmount was far from the only investor to make a profit on Cogent’s recent news. Other managers including Commodore, Deep Track, Deerfield, Exome, Farallon, Kynam, Superstring, and TCG Crossover all built meaningful positions in Cogent from 2021 to 2025, with many trimming their positions alongside Fairmount earlier this year.

Another group of managers have more recently initiated positions after Cogent’s late-2025 jump including AIHC, Defilade, NextBio and Patient Square.

As a reminder, OWL users can use our Manager Search functionality to filter our 19,000 managers by a wide range of factors. Below we show a list filtered for Biotech which returns 212 managers that could be further filtered by criteria including location, AUM, disclosed LPs, returns, and specific private holdings:

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• Blackstone to Debut First Hedge Fund for Mini-Millionaires 

• Health Care Hedge Fund Closing Down 

• RA Capital Preps New Biotech SPAC — With an Eye on China’s Risks 

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.