Lone Pine Capital

Stephen Mandel

Stephen Mandel is the founder of Lone Pine Capital, the Greenwich, Connecticut hedge fund he opened in 1997 with backing from his mentor, Julian Robertson of Tiger Management. Mandel's route there ran through Dartmouth College, a Harvard Business School MBA, a stint as a senior consultant at Mars & Co., and six years as a mass-market retailing analyst at Goldman Sachs. He joined Tiger Management in 1990 as a consumer analyst and rose to senior managing director and director of equities, sitting on the firm's management committee. Robertson thought so highly of him that he called Mandel "probably the greatest analyst of all time." When Mandel left Tiger in 1997 to go out on his own, Robertson backed the new venture, making Mandel one of the founding "Tiger Cubs," the cohort of Robertson's protégés who built their own firms. The name Lone Pine comes from a historic pine tree on the Dartmouth campus that survived a lightning strike in 1887. Mandel runs both long-only and long/short equity strategies built on bottom-up, fundamental research. He looks for companies with strong organic earnings growth or businesses undergoing strategic changes whose full value the market has not yet priced in, and he favors a concentrated book of high-conviction positions, judging candidates on management quality and durable competitive advantage.