Coatue Management shook up its top tech holdings in the first quarter. The hedge fund firm headed by Tiger Cub Philippe Laffont pared down the positions of three major investments and boosted its stakes in two others, catapulting them into the firm’s top-five U.S. common stock long positions.
Coatue is one among a number of prominent members of the Tiger crowd that made significant changes in the January-through-March period, according to an analysis of first-quarter 13F filings, made public Wednesday.
In the first quarter, Coatue reduced its stake in previous No. 1 holding Meta Platforms by more than 23 percent. Even so, Meta moved up to become Coatue’s biggest U.S.-listed long position at the end of the first quarter after holding second place at year-end. This is because in the first quarter, Coatue also slashed its stake in high-flying Nvidia by 68 percent. The AI chip designer’s stock slipped from being the firm’s largest long to being the seventh largest.
Coatue also cut its stake in chip giant Advanced Micro Devices — its third-largest long at year-end — by nearly half. It is now the firm’s eighth-largest long. At the same time, Coatue made a huge bet on another chip giant — Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. — making what was a nearly insignificant stake the firm’s fifth-largest holding.
Cloud-based software giant Salesforce, meanwhile, is the fourth-largest long after Coatue bolstered its stake by nearly 120 percent. Amazon and Microsoft moved up to the second and third spots, respectively, even though Coatue tinkered with the two holdings during the first quarter.
Elsewhere, O. Andreas Halvorsen’s Viking Global Investors established a large new position in casino giant Las Vegas Sands, making it the firm’s seventh-largest U.S.-listed long as of the end of March. It also more than doubled its stake in U.S. Bancorp, now its sixth-largest long, and liquidated former No. 2 long UPS, the freight delivery giant.
Karthik Sarma’s SRS Investment Management established two significant new positions in the first quarter: Advanced Micro Devices is now its sixth-largest U.S.-listed long, and American Airlines Group is its eighth largest.
Hound Partners, for its part, established a new position in iShares Bitcoin Trust, an exchange-traded fund that seeks to track the price of Bitcoin.
Meanwhile, Chase Coleman’s Tiger Global Management made one major change in the first quarter: The Tiger Cub boosted its stake in Google parent Alphabet by 154 percent, making it the firm’s third-largest U.S. long position. Otherwise, it stood pat with its two largest longs, Meta and Microsoft, which combined account for about two-thirds of the firm’s U.S. common stock portfolio.
Lee Ainslie III’s Maverick Capital reduced its stake in Korean e-commerce giant Coupang by more than 25 percent. It had overwhelmingly been the firm’s largest long for several years. As of the end of March, Maverick owned a little more than 54 million shares, valued at roughly $965 million, which made up roughly 18 percent of its U.S. common stock long portfolio. Two years ago, Maverick owned 86 million shares, more than one-quarter of the U.S. portfolio.