June was a tough month for most hedge funds — but not for one small manager who foresaw the commodities rout.
Anuraag Shah’s Tusker Investment Fund, a $105 million commodities fund based in Los Angeles, with an office in Chicago, gained a whopping 15.6 percent last month, compared with a loss of 2.75 percent for the Absolute Return Commodities Index. The entire hedge-fund universe fell 0.78 percent.
Industry insiders said that Tusker’s performance could be the best monthly gain in the $2 trillion industry — certainly light years ahead of what the billion-dollar rock-star funds turned in.
Shah launched his fund in May 2011, after two years of working for famed hedge-fund trader Dmitry Balyasny. After Balyasny’s BAM Atlas Global, he he founded Tusker Capital and ran a managed account that gained 33.6 percent in 2010, with a 19.6 percent gain the next year with the launch of Tusker fund.
This year has proved rocky. He had four down months, but the June numbers give Shah a 6.5 percent gain for the year.
Last year, although he was up only 5.3 percent, Absolute Return named Shah one of its five rising stars.
“We are going to have a massive implosion of commodities in the next few years,” Shah told Absolute Return in December. “As global economies recover, you will see an eventual unwinding of quantitative easing and rate hikes back to normal. A lot of the leveraged money which has been parked in commodities is going to come out.”
He could not be reached for comment.