The LSE Directory / Hedge funds
The Baupost Group, L.L.C. is a privately held Boston investment manager that runs a family of privately offered, exempt limited partnerships for institutional and family clients. Its business is discretionary portfolio management under a single broad, flexible mandate rather than separate single-strategy funds, spanning public equities and credit, distressed debt, private credit, private equity and real estate. Baupost differentiates itself from most multi-strategy hedge funds by running with minimal leverage, applying it mainly to real estate positions at roughly a 1:1 ratio, and by holding unusually large cash balances, historically as much as 30 to 50 percent of the portfolio, when it judges few securities to be priced with a sufficient margin of safety. Its clients are families, foundations and endowments rather than a broad retail or fund of funds audience, and the firm has periodically closed to new capital instead of growing assets for their own sake. Per its SEC Form ADV, the minimum account size is $10 million and its standard fee is a 1.25 percent management fee plus 20 percent of eligible profits. The firm was founded in 1982 by Seth Klarman together with Harvard Business School professor William Poorvu and colleagues Howard Stevenson, Jordan Baruch and Isaac Auerbach. Klarman remains CEO and portfolio manager, working alongside President Jim Mooney, and wrote the 1991 investing text "Margin of Safety," now long out of print and sought after by collectors. Baupost opened a London office in 2011 to pursue European distressed opportunities after the sovereign debt crisis. The firm generated roughly 20 percent annualized returns in its first decades, though performance has been more moderate over the past ten years. Regulatory filings put its assets under management at approximately $24 billion as of its most recent Form ADV, down from a peak near $30 billion in the years after the 2008 financial crisis; LinkedIn and SEC-linked data list the firm at over 200 employees. In its most recently disclosed quarterly holdings (the quarter ended December 2025), Baupost cut its Alphabet stake by about 41 percent after the stock's roughly 70 percent prior year rise, while increasing its position in payments company Fiserv by 146 percent as that stock traded well below its historical valuation multiple, a pairing that illustrates the firm's continued value-oriented, event-driven approach to public equities.
