Viking Global's longtime head of trading is stepping down from the $55 billion asset manager

• Stuart Brown is stepping down as head of trading at $55 billion hedge fund Viking Global.
• Brown has worked at the hedge fund for 18 years, according to his profile on the firm's website.
• The hedge fund was up only 8.6%, trailing the market and many Tiger Cub peers.

Billionaire Andreas Halvorsen will soon lose another longtime lieutenant.

Stuart Brown, the longtime head of trading for Viking Global, is stepping down from the $55 billion asset manager to take a career break, two people familiar with the move told Business Insider. The firm declined to comment, and Brown could not be reached for comment.

Brown was at the long-running Tiger Cub, a nickname for hedge funds that spun out of late billionaire Julian Robertson's Tiger Management, for 18 years, according to his bio on the firm's website. He joined the firm after working on the corporate credit sales desk at Credit Suisse.

One of the people close to the firm said Brown's official departure date is not yet known. Brown will help the firm during a transition period, this person said.

Viking has lost several senior members of its team in recent years, which now numbers 275 employees, according to the firm's site.

From the investing side, Ning Jin, the former chief investment officer of Viking, left the firm in August 2024 to start his own fund, Avantyr Capital.

On the operations side of the business, the firm's former general counsel, Andrew Genser, joined former Viking portfolio manager Divya Nettimi's fund, Avala Global, last summer. Viking's director of recruiting, Kevin Curtis, moved to Bobby Jain's eponymous fund in September 2025, and the firm's former investor relations head, Savina Boyadjieva, just started as a partner at Joshua Kushner's Thrive Capital.

While Viking's peers include long-short equity funds such as Tiger Global, Coatue, Lone Pine, D1, Maverick, and others, the firm is not as tech-heavy as some of the other Tiger Cubs. In some years, such as 2022, this can help the manager, but when mega-stocks like Nvidia, Amazon, and Microsoft drive a bulk of the market's returns, it can lead to Viking missing out on some gains.

Last year was an example of this: Viking returned less than 9% on the year in its flagship fund, a person close to the manager said, less than the S&P 500 index.