Julian Robertson took a deceptively simple approach to investing: own the best companies and bet against the worst ones. To succeed in the investment world means being right on more occasions than you are wrong. And for most of Robertson’s time running Tiger Management — the hedge fund firm he founded in 1980 — he was right.

Robertson, who has died aged 90, was an investment industry giant who spawned a dynasty of hedge fund managers known as the “Tiger cubs”.

Born in North Carolina in 1932, Robertson served as an officer in the US Navy after university. In 1957, he joined Kidder, Peabody & Co, an American securities firm, as a sales trainee, where he befriended the son-in-law of Alfred Winslow Jones, the intellectual father of the hedge fund industry. This would lay the foundations for Tiger’s investment approach.