Wall St.’ s best golfer
Many on Wall Street can say they are members or have played Augusta National, but not one can utter what Trip Kuehne can – that he played in The Masters.
Kuehne, 42, has been known during his 11 years in money management as the best golfer on Wall Street. While proud of the moniker, he also wants to move past it.
The finance pro stopped playing elite- level amateur golf after he won the 2007 US Mid- Amateur, a US Golf Association event targeted at post- college players. The Oklahoma State University psychology major gave up all competitive golf after playing in his second Masters Tournament the next year. Kuehne has also played in four US Opens.
His focus flipped — from golf spikes to price spikes — as Double Eagle Capital, which he began in the summer of 2005 with $ 6 million in client money, began to grow.
He now manages about $ 240 million for investors including Kyle Bass, whom Kuehne has known since he joined White- Rock Capital Partners in Dallas in May 1997, three days after earning his MBA from OSU.
“Trip’s found a niche that works,” Bass, 45, said.
“He’s got a network of high networth individuals who can’t necessarily meet $ 5 million minimums for individual hedge funds. Trip gives them the capacity to take $ 1 million or whatever and diversify it among four or five funds that are otherwise closed to individual investors.”
Run by hand- picked money managers— from firms including Paul Tudor Jones’s Tudor Investment Corp., Louis Bacon’s Moore Capital Management and David Tepper’s Appaloosa Management — Double Eagle’s $ 178 million Ace Fund generated a compounded annual rate of return of more than 10 percent from its inception in August 2005 through February, compared with an annual return of 8.2 percent for the S& P 500 in the same period. Bloomberg