Carlson Capital is a Dallas, Texas-based multi-strategy alternative hedge fund that provides additional offices in Houston, New York City, Palm Beach Gardens, Greenwich, and London. It was founded by Clint Carlson back in 1993 and grew big since then, now managing more than $7 billion in hedge fund and CLO assets. Prior to launching his own alternative investment management firm, Clint Carlson honed his investment acumen at Bass Brothers, where he was at the head of risk arbitrage. He earned a B.A. and an M.B.A. from Rice University and a Doctorate of J.D. from the University of Houston.

Insider Monkey’s flagship strategy identifies the best performing 100 hedge funds at the end of each quarter and invests in their consensus stock picks. This way it is always invested in the best ideas of the best performing hedge funds and is able to generate much higher returns than the market. Since its inception in May 2014, our flagship strategy generated a cumulative return of 103%, beating the S&P 500 ETF (SPY) by nearly 38 percentage points (see the details here). Our best performing hedge funds strategy also returned 26.4% year-to-date and outperformed the S&P 500 Index by nearly 12 percentage points. We take a closer look at hedge funds like Carlson Capital in order to identify their best and worst ideas.

At the end of the first quarter of 2019, Carlson Capital’s equity portfolio was worth $5.63 billion, and it counted around 230 long positions. The top new buys included First Data Corporation (NYSE:FDC), Celgene Corporation (NASDAQ:CELG), Worldpay, Inc. (NYSE:WP), The PNC Financial Services Group, Inc. (NYSE:PNC), and Citigroup Inc. (NYSE:C). Among stakes which fund raised during the quarter were Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT), Tribune Media Company (NYSE:TRCO), and Visa Inc. (NYSE:V).

During the Q1 2019, Carlson Capital lost optimism for and lowered its stakes in Bunge Limited (NYSE:BG), The Hartford Financial Services Group, Inc. (NYSE:HIG), and Altaba Inc. (NASDAQ:AABA). It also dumped its positions in SunTrust Banks, Inc. (NYSE:STI), Lennar Corporation (NYSE:LEN), and CenterPoint Energy, Inc. (NYSE:CNP).

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This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.