Lone Pine Capital

In 1887, lightning struck a pine tree on the Dartmouth campus. It should have died. It didn’t.

More than a century later, a Dartmouth grad named Stephen Mandel needed a name for his new hedge fund. He named his firm after that tree. Lone Pine Capital opened in 1997.

Like the tree, Lone Pine has outlasted bubbles, crashes and a few generations of peers.

In this article, we dive into Stephen Mandel’s career, the story of Lone Pine Capital, intel on the firm’s research process and research team, and more.

Stephen Mandel

Stephen Mandel grew up in Darien, Connecticut, an affluent coastal town.

He graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy and earned his BA in government from Dartmouth College in 1978. In 1982, he earned his MBA from Harvard Business School.

His HBS class was stacked. Among his classmates were:

• Seth Klarman, the renowned value investor behind the Baupost Group
• Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase & Co.
• Steve Burke, Chairman of NBCUniversal
• Jeff Immelt, former CEO of General Electric and, like Mandel, a Dartmouth alum

Mandel started his career at Mars and Company, a consulting firm, where he worked from 1982 to 1984. There he became an expert in supermarkets.

That expertise took him to Goldman Sachs. From 1984 to 1990, he worked in equity research under Joe Ellis, covering retail. Because of his supermarket background, he focused on food and drug retailing.

Joe Ellis delegated the coverage of Walmart to Mandel and he dedicated a large amount of effort on Walmart, earning him attention of top buy-side investors.

In 1990, Mandel joined Julian Robertson’s Tiger Management as a consumer analyst.

The people who knew Mandel best rated him at the very top. Seth Klarman, his old classmate and the founder of Baupost, said:

“Steve Mandel is the best industry analyst I’ve ever met, who became the best long-short hedge-fund manager of his generation.”

Julian Robertson, his boss at Tiger, went even further. He called Mandel:

“Probably the greatest analyst of all time.”

At Tiger, he was also Lee Ainslie’s boss for a time. Mandel wholeheartedly backed Ainslie’s promotion to Head of Technology. It was a pivotal step that eventually led Ainslie to start Maverick Capital in 1993.

Over seven years at Tiger, Mandel served on the Management Committee, as director of equities and as a portfolio manager.

In 1997, he struck out on his own.