US technology hedge fund beats Nasdaq

Bloomberg

Lucrative opportunities in technology stocks centre around identifying shifts from an old way of doing things to a better way, like from email to instant messaging or from phoning in food orders to doing it online.
Investing with that in mind for nearly a decade has helped Silicon Valley-based Light Street Capital beat the Nasdaq, according to Barron’s in its May 27 issue.
Since its July 2010 inception, the firm’s long-short strategy has topped the Nasdaq’s 17.5 percent net annualised return with one of 19.1 percent. Its $1.5 billion Light Street Mercury Master fund hasn’t outpaced the benchmark so far, returning 16 percent after fees through April 30, versus 22 percent for the Nasdaq at that point. But the year isn’t over.
Glen Kacher, Light Street Capital’s chief investment
officer, and Jay Kahn, a partner at the firm, say Slack Technologies Inc; UK-based restaurant delivery company Just Eat Plc and online apparel retailer Farfetch Ltd are some of their top picks, according to Barron’s.
Slack is scheduled for a direct listing next month. The company’s free instant messaging service has a potential market of more than 200 million users and is only 5 percent penetrated, Kacher, a former analyst at Julian Robertson’s Tiger Management, told Barron’s.
“The opportunity is that what we’ve been doing at work — using email for the past 20 years — is shifting,” Kacher said. “And there is one major winner in that shift: Slack.”
The global shift to ordering food online is clear as well. As Amazon.com Inc leads a $575 million investment in London-based startup Deliveroo, pitting it directly against Uber in a cutthroat European food delivery industry, Just Eat is “a great business,” said Kahn. It trades at about half the valuation of peers Takeaway.com NV and Delivery Hero SE and should grow somewhere around 20 percent to 30 percent a year globally, he said.