Roughly 70-80 per cent of the hedge fund’s assets are still sitting in cash, Laffont told the Robin Hood Investors Conference last month, as he anticipates a further fall in stocks.

Coatue believes that the best defence against a tough macro environment is to identify the tectonic shifts that come each decade. “You don’t need a thousand big ideas to do well in our business, you just need the one or two key ideas that then all the dominoes start falling from,” said Laffont. In 2007 Apple opened investors to the world of mobile internet, while the launch of Amazon Web Services in 2006 heralded the rise of cloud computing.

Three of Coatue’s top themes for the next decade are electric vehicles, artificial intelligence and climate technology. The firm envisions a world where electric vehicles are powered by solar panels, AI enables hyper-individualised content, and homes become individual power plants sending electricity back to the grid. Coatue has built a large position in US chipmaker Nvidia — whose shares are down over 45 per cent this year — because demand for semiconductors lies at the intersection of all of these technological innovations.

“I am anxious to deploy capital and at the right price we’re going to do it,” Laffont said on the investor call last month. “But there’s still value in being patient and responsible and the downside could be significant . . .The better we manage risk on the downside, the more aggressive we can be on the recovery.”

Source: https://www.ft.com/.../36f2376f-8ccb-475c-bcbf-838626b8be78