To be sure, some funds appear to have closed because of poor performance.  Axial, the once-$1.8 billion firm seeded Robertson, said it was shutting down in late 2013 after several years of losses fueled by short bets against stocks.  TigerShark, a small hedge fund manager led by Tiger Cubs Tom Facciola and Michael Sears, also said it would shut in March, according to Bloomberg. The firm, also a Tiger seed, was reportedly hurt by bets against stocks. TigerShark managed $154.6 million as of Dec. 31, 2014, according to a filing.  One of the hallmarks of Tiger training was to bet both for and against companies, expressed by going long or short their stocks. While most Tiger family funds usually have more long investments on than short, betting against companies in the post-2008 bull market has generally been a losing strategy.  The reasons for Cascabel, the latest Tiger seed to shut, were not clear. But the fund lost 9.4 percent since June 2011, according to performance information obtained by CNBC.com. That compares to a gain of 68.5 percent for the S&P 500 Total Return index. The firm, founded by Laurence Chang and Tiger Cub Scott Sinclair, managed just $76.9 million as of April 30, according to the same document.  Hedge fund investors showed some sympathy for managers losing on shorts.  "After six years of a partially artificially driven roaring bull market in both equities and bonds, where correlations have been high and dispersion low, the shutdown of these Tiger Cubs reminds me of the shutdown of Julian Robertson's Tiger hedge fund in 2000—marking perhaps the end of that cycle and the beginning of a cycle where investors will have wished they were hedged," Mike Hennessy, co-founder of hedge fund allocator Morgan Creek Capital Management, said in an email.  Robertson's fund was highly successful overall but stumbled on a bad yen bet and then on value stocks just before the technology bubble-fueled market crashed in the spring of 2000. When Tiger returned outside capital then, it managed just $6.5 billion.  Read More Chanos up as many shorts stumble
At least 7 hedge funds with ties to Julian Robertson's Tiger Management have shut in recent years, but is it a trend?