Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. seemed to fall out of favor with some hedge funds in the first three months of the year as China’s crackdown on the technology sector weighed on the e-commerce giant. It was a top exit for Third Point and Coatue; Soroban Capital Partners trimmed its stake.
George Soros’s investment firm was among those that capitalized on the distressed remains of Archegos. His Soros Fund Management snapped up shares of ViacomCBS Inc., Discovery Inc. and Baidu Inc. as they were being sold off in massive blocks during the collapse of Archegos at the end of March. Coatue also started smaller new positions in three of the names in the quarter: a $148 million stake in Farfetch Ltd., a $147 million position in RLX Technology Inc. and a $77 million holding in ViacomCBS. And D1 Capital added 124,000 shares of Shopify Inc. for a stake valued at $137 million. Elliott Management Corp. disclosed it held a $95 million stake in Discovery Inc.
David Tepper’s Appaloosa also took a toehold in five of the stocks that Archegos had to divest, including Shopify, ViacomCBS, Discovery, Baidu and Iqiyi. The stakes had a combined value of $217 million at the end of March, and ranged in size from a $155 million investment in ViacomCBS to a $4.1 million bet on Shopify.
Starboard Value jumped on a hot Wall Street trend: SPACs. The activist investor, which launched its own blank-check company last year, made relatively small investments in 18 such companies in the quarter, including ones being run by notable investors such as Michael Klein and Alex Rodriguez and private equity firms KKR & Co. and Warburg Pincus. Another activist investor, Keith Meister’s Corvex Management, also snapped up several SPAC names in the quarter.
Michael Burry, the investor who rose to fame for making billions off bets against mortgage securities during the financial crisis, placed a sizable wager against Elon Musk’s Tesla Inc. Burry’s Scion Asset Management owned bearish puts against 800,100 shares of the electric-car maker, worth $534 million as of March 31, according to a regulatory filing Monday.
—With assistance from Miles Weiss, Hema Parmar and Peter Eichenbaum.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.