NEW YORK (Reuters) – Investors will be watching quarterly reports on Wednesday for a look at how some of the world’s biggest money managers fared at the end of the second quarter, a period marked by a string of record highs in the run-up to the latest bout of turmoil in U.S. stocks.
Form 13-F filings are filed at the end of each quarter and are one of the few ways to get a quick picture of how often secretive market participants like hedge funds and sovereign wealth funds are moving, although they look backward and don’t disclose their current holdings.
The S&P 500 rose about 4% from the beginning of April through the end of June, hitting nine consecutive record highs in a rally fueled by excitement over artificial intelligence and expectations that the Federal Reserve will be able to lower U.S. inflation without hurting growth.
Markets turned frothy at the start of the third quarter. Concerns about high valuations weighed on several tech giants, including chipmaker Nvidia (NASDAQ:), which has been the poster child for the rise of artificial intelligence. Worries about the U.S. economy and interest rate hikes by the Bank of Japan further rattled markets, leading to a sharp drop in the S&P 500 in early August. The index has recouped much of those losses in recent days.
Here’s an overview of how some of the largest funds were positioned at the end of July:
Soros Capital Management
Robert Soros’ family office dissolved its $26.6 million stake in Microsoft (NASDAQ:) (or 63,340 shares) in late March and sold all 103,000 shares it owned in Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ:) in the second quarter, while reducing exposure to other big tech companies, such as Amazon (NASDAQ:), Uber Technologies (NYSE:), Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company and Meta Platforms. Soros dissolved a large, typically bearish, short position in the iShares iBoxx $ High Yield Corporate Bond exchange-traded fund.
Saudi Public Investment Fund
Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund closed its position in weight-loss company Allurion Technologies Inc., selling about 1.2 million shares. It also doubled its position in Brazilian digital banking company Nu Holdings Ltd., adding about 2.6 million shares, and added to existing long positions — typically seen as bullish — in large technology stocks including PayPal (NASDAQ: ), Microsoft (NASDAQ: ) and Meta Platforms Inc. (NASDAQ: ).
The fund held about $20.7 billion in U.S. stocks in the second quarter. In the first quarter, it cut its holdings by about half, to $18 billion.
Jana’s partners
Activist investor Jana Partners built a new stake in U.S. software company BlackLine Systems (NASDAQ:BLK) during the second quarter. Jana owned 1.15 million shares as of June 30, equivalent to a stake of about 2%.
(This story has been corrected to clarify that the fund referred to is Soros Capital Management, the family office of Robert Soros, not Soros Fund Management, the family office of George Soros, in paragraphs 6 and 7.)
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