NEW YORK (Reuters) - Chris Connor, a former partner at hedge fund JAT Capital Management, has launched his own fund, Ardmore Global Investors, which will specialize in picking global technology, media and telecommunications stocks.
"We are now actively putting capital to work," Connor wrote in a letter to investors and friends, dated Monday and seen by Reuters on Tuesday.
The fund started trading with $120 million in assets and has committed capital of as much as $200 million.
A spokeswoman for the firm declined to comment.
Connor had worked at John Thaler's JAT Capital from 2007 until the fund returned investors' capital in 2015. At JAT, Connor ranked as the firm's top performing investment analyst.
"Our portfolio construction is designed to create a balanced portfolio and position us to be opportunistic in noisy and volatile markets," Connor wrote in the letter.
He hired three former JAT analysts - Abhinav Kumar, Matt Hostetler, and Andrew Johnston - and Ray Bao, who used to work for prominent technology investor Dan Benton's Andor Capital.
Connor is launching his fund at a time many hedge funds are in the red - the average fund is off 2 percent this year, according to Hedge Fund Research. Analysts are noting that many of the themes the worked last year, including bets on tech stocks like Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) and Netflix (NASDAQ:NFLX), are losing money this year.