An obscure Australian hedge fund manager who last year became a media darling with his acerbic attacks on Bill Ackman’s $1 billion Herbalife short is now sobbing to his investors about losing money.
“Things that should work are not working,” John Hempton of Bronte Capital moaned to investors in February.
Hempton has been wallowing in self-pity, said sources familiar with the hedgie. Hempton, they said, feels humiliated by Ackman’s recent successes given that Hempton — who runs a $46 million fund in the US — spent last year adamantly professing that the activist billionaire was “wrong.”
“We are significantly long Herbalife,” Bronte recently confessed in what he called his “tradition of self-flagellation.” In his March 2014 investor letter, which The Post has obtained, Hempton noted that the stock has reacted “very badly” to recent regulatory news and cost his fund a “few percent” of its portfolio last month.
Bronte Capital is down around 2.4 percent through March.
“We have a deep desire to make some serious money for clients. We think it will happen but we can’t say when,” he wrote on April 14.
Last year he sang a different tune. “The shorts have now been categorically shown to be wrong,” he said in January, boasting that Herbalife was his “best stock of the year.” The fund gained 37 percent in 2013.
Hempton was one of the first to loudly berate Ackman’s Herbalife short. At first, he called the company “scuzzy,” but after Herbalife directed him to a Queens nutrition club, Hempton decided it was just like AA — except that people join the group effort to lose weight.