Druckenmiller Goes Shopping

Stan Druckenmiller went on a buying spree in the first quarter.

Sure, a lot has been made of the fact the legendary macro trader slashed his stake in high-flying chip company Nvidia. But at the same time, his Duquesne Family Office was establishing more new positions than it has in any quarter since it began filing quarterly disclosure statements in 2018.

Altogether, Duquesne Family Office made 42 new U.S.-listed common stock investments and liquidated 20 common stocks in the first quarter. As a result, it held 72 different U.S. common stock long positions as of the end of March, more than any other period, according to its recent 13F filing. This compares with 50 positions at year-end and just 41 at the end of third-quarter 2023.

Just one of the new positions, however, cracked Duquesne’s top-ten ranking: Coherent Corp., maker of optical materials and semiconductors, which is now the family office’s seventh-largest U.S.-listed common stock long.

Druckenmiller also initiated a large position in call options to buy the iShares Russell 2000 exchange-traded fund, a big bet on small-cap stocks. Many of the new positions are small or midcap stocks. Of course, there were exceptions; Duquesne did take new midsize stakes in several large companies. For example, financial services giant Discover Financial Services is now Duquesne’s 15th-largest U.S. common stock long. Kinder Morgan, the energy infrastructure company, is the 17th-largest long.

Duquesne took new relatively small stakes in several of the most widely held stocks: Meta Platforms, Citigroup, and Apple.

Discovery and Citigroup are not the only financial services–related companies in Duquesne’s portfolio. In the first quarter, the firm initiated a total of ten new positions in this sector, including KeyCorp, Capital One Financial, and SPDR S&P Regional Banking ETF.

The firm also initiated 13 new health care–related investments, most of them small positions in smaller companies, including many biopharma stocks. Its second-biggest new health care position was in Crinetics Pharmaceuticals, a clinical-stage pharma company that develops therapeutics for endocrine diseases, whose market cap is less than $4 billion. And Duquesne established a small stake in Sana Biotechnology, which has a market cap under $2 billion.

One large new health care position is in IQVIA Holdings, which serves the health information technology and clinical research industries. Its market cap is more than $41 billion.

As for Nvidia, Duquesne cut its stake by more than 70 percent in the first quarter, for a total of 80 percent over the past two quarters. Nvidia is now Duquesne’s sixth-largest U.S. common stock long position after being the largest or second largest for much of last year.