David Einhorn is worth $1.5 billion but his best days are long gone
It's gone from bad to worse for David Einhorn. He has underperformed the stock market since the end of the crisis but until recently he was still making positive returns.
In 2017, the company was managing a peak of $11.8 billion. It's been nearly halved.
It all started to come apart in 2015 when his firm Greenlight Capital was down 20%, then rebounded with an 8.4% in 2016 (compared to 12.0% in the S&P 500) and followed that with a 1.6% return in 2017 (versus +21.8% in the S&P 500).
The company still harps on a 15.4% annualized return since inception in 1996 but that's built on a 26% annualized return in his first decade and not much comfort to someone who invested in the past decade.
The hope was that his strategy would pay off in a turn in markets but despite trouble this year, his performance has gotten worse. In January alone the company lost 6% and went onto lose 13.6% in Q1 then another 1.1% in April. He's now just as well-known for touting bets against Netflix and Amazon as his devastating short on Lehman Brothers. He split with his wife of 24 years in 2017.
Institutional Investor is out with a profile of Einhorn's troubles and it shows a man who is still sure of himself but may have lost his way after the crisis when the Fed changed the rules of the game and he couldn't adapt.
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