Viking Still Desperately Ill With COVID, Still Convinced It’s Almost Over

If there has been anything we’ve learned during the past two miserable and immiserating years, it’s this: Better days are just around the corner and that is a bright, shining light of a new Roaring Twenties you see at the end of this tunnel of disease and death. It’ll just be another couple of weeks and then we can all get back to normal, just as it has for the last 23 months.

Viking Global Investors chief Andreas Halvorsen writes to his clients that this is not the lesson he’s learned. He and his raiders “underestimated the ongoing impact of Covid” last year, he solemnly informs them, losing 4.5% of their money, which could have appreciated by more than a quarter had they dumped it into a S&P 500 index fund, instead. Seems the worldwide return to travel and elective surgery didn’t quite pan out, any more than that big bet on Peloton.

“In hindsight,” Halvorsen wrote, “these were bad bets.” And if you think that sentence is pregnant with a but—in this case, a “but this time we’re right and this thing is really almost well and truly over,” well, Halvorsen doesn’t disappoint.

“We have maintained our positioning and believe companies exposed to reopening will benefit from both an improvement in fundamentals and a re-rating of multiples.”

Viking Hedge Fund Blames 2021 Losses on ‘Underestimating’ Covid [Bloomberg]