Clarium Capital Management LLC was an American

investment management Investment management (sometimes referred to more generally as financial asset management) is the professional asset management of various Security (finance), securities, including shareholdings, Bond (finance), bonds, and other assets, such as r ...

and

hedge fund A hedge fund is a Pooling (resource management), pooled investment fund that holds Market liquidity, liquid assets and that makes use of complex trader (finance), trading and risk management techniques to aim to improve investment performance and ...

company pursuing a

global macro Global macro is an investment strategy that leverages Macroeconomics, macroeconomic and Geopolitics, geopolitical data to analyze and predict moves in Financial market, financial markets. Large-scale or "wiktionary:macro, macro" political and econ ...

strategy. It was founded in San FranciscoClarium Capital on Google Maps
/ref> in 2002 by

Peter Thiel Peter Andreas Thiel (; born 11 October 1967) is an American entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and political activist. A co-founder of PayPal, Palantir Technologies, and Founders Fund, he was the first outside investor in Facebook. According ...

, co-founder of

PayPal PayPal Holdings, Inc. is an American multinational financial technology company operating an online payments system in the majority of countries that support E-commerce payment system, online money transfers; it serves as an electronic alter ...

and early investor in

Facebook Facebook is a social media and social networking service owned by the American technology conglomerate Meta Platforms, Meta. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with four other Harvard College students and roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andre ...

."Thiel's Hedge Fund Plummet"
''New York Post''. Retrieved June 27, 2010. Its

assets under management In finance, assets under management (AUM), sometimes called fund under management, refers to the total market value of all financial assets that a financial institution—such as a mutual fund, venture capital firm, or depository institutio ...

grew to $8 billion in 2008, after which a series of unprofitable investments and client redemptions shrank that to about $350 million as of 2011.

Function and history

Clarium was an

employee-owned Employee stock ownership, or employee share ownership, is where a company's employees own shares in that company (or in the parent company of a group of companies). US employees typically acquire shares through a share option plan. In the UK, Emp ...

firm that invests in

public equity A public company is a company whose ownership is organized via shares of stock which are intended to be freely traded on a stock exchange or in over-the-counter markets. A public (publicly traded) company can be listed on a stock exchange (li ...

(primarily in micro-cap companies),

fixed income Fixed income refers to any type of investment under which the borrower or issuer is obliged to make payments of a fixed amount on a fixed schedule. For example, the borrower may have to pay interest at a fixed rate once a year and repay the pr ...

, and hedging markets. Unlike most funds, which charge clients about a 2% management fee for their total assets invested and an additional 20%

performance fee A performance fee is a fee that a client account or an investment fund may be charged by the investment manager that manages its assets in addition to its management fee. A performance fee may be calculated many ways. With respect to a separa ...

of the increase in the fund's

net asset value Net asset value (NAV) is the value of an entity's assets minus the value of its Liability (financial accounting), liabilities, often in relation to open-end fund, open-end, mutual fund, mutual funds, Hedge fund, hedge funds, and Venture capital, v ...

, Clarium charged a 0% management fee and a performance fee of 25%. The company stopped working while Thiel worked at PayPal and resumed in 2002."Clarium Capital Management LLC"
''BusinessWeek''. Retrieved June 28, 2010. In 2008, Clarium moved its headquarters from San Francisco to New York City. In June 2010 Thiel closed the New York office to consolidate the company into one location at its San Francisco office. By 2011, the company had shrunk by 90%. It was considered defunct by 2013.

Performance

2002

Clarium's 2002 performance, a series of correct bets in the

energy market An energy market is a type of commodity market on which electricity, heat, and fuel products are traded. Natural gas and electricity are examples of products traded on an energy market. Other energy commodities include: oil, coal, carbon emission ...

s that global demand would cause an oil shortage, was described by a 2009 ''

Wall Street Journal ''The Wall Street Journal'' (''WSJ''), also referred to simply as the ''Journal,'' is an American newspaper based in New York City. The newspaper provides extensive coverage of news, especially business and finance. It operates on a subscriptio ...

'' article as "impressive".

2008-2010

Clarium was down 4.5% in 2008,"Hedge Fund Portfolio Tracking: Peter Thiel's Clarium Capital, Q4 2008"
/ref> down 25% in 2009,
/ref> and down 23% in 2010.
/ref> For the first half of 2008, the fund had a YTD return of 57.9%."Clarium hedge fund posts gains of 57.9 percent"
Reuters. Retrieved June 28, 2010. At the start of 2008, the fund had $4 billion in

(AUM), raised to $7.8 billion in June 2008, then dropped to $1.5 billion in July 2009, after investors withdrew money from the fund."The Quick Gutting of Peter Thiel's Clarium Capital"
. Gawker. Retrieved June 27, 2010. It lost most of its value in 2008 on large bets that the

US dollar The United States dollar (symbol: $; currency code: USD) is the official currency of the United States and several other countries. The Coinage Act of 1792 introduced the U.S. dollar at par with the Spanish silver dollar, divided it int ...

would fall, and AUM reached $681 million in December 2010.

References

External links