Stanley Druckenmiller seemed pretty busy during the second quarter, at least by most hedge fund standards.
During the three-month period, his Duquesne Family Office initiated 19 new U.S. common stock positions and liquidated 20 — pretty active trading for a portfolio of 60 long bets.
However, a deeper dive into Druckenmiller’s trading activities suggests the second quarter was relatively tame for the legendary macro trader.
For one thing, the value of the common stock portfolio was virtually unchanged, slipping slightly to $3.36 billion at the end of the second quarter, excluding options, compared with $3.45 billion the prior quarter. In the first quarter, Druckenmiller had more than doubled the value of his U.S. common stock portfolio —and more than doubled the number of individual positions.
What’s more, just one new stock cracked the top-10 largest positions as of the end of the second quarter, while no previous top-10 holding was liquidated during the period.
In addition, Duquesne did not aggressively add or subtract from its largest positions.
In fact, it barely added to its huge stake in Microsoft, the family office’s largest long position at a little less than 21 percent of the portfolio.
But we don’t know where Duquesne is positioned in strategies other than U.S. long equities.
Druckenmiller declined to comment.
[II Deep Dive: Stan Druckenmiller is Bullish on U.S. Stocks]
Interest in Druckenmiller’s trading activity remains even after he shut down his hedge fund to outside investors several years ago. Druckenmiller, who once managed the Quantum Fund along with George Soros, claims to have made money in each of the 30 years that he ran money on behalf of clients. He was a stock picker in his early days before evolving into a macro investor.
In the second quarter, Uber Technologies became Duquesne’s sixth largest long bet after the ride app pioneer went public. It now accounts for roughly 3.7 percent of Duquesne’s U.S. stock portfolio. It is not known whether Druckenmiller had invested in the company when it was private.
Its next largest new position is cloud specialist Salesforce.com, but that only accounts for a little more than 2 percent of the portfolio’s assets. In the first quarter, Duquesne liquidated all of its shares of Salesforce.com, which was its third-biggest long at year-end and one of its top holdings all last year.
E-commerce giant Amazon.com moved up to become the second largest long, partly because Duquesne boosted its position by 10 percent. It now accounts for about 7 percent of the portfolio.
Rounding out the top-five are streaming video giant Netflix, Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding, and software giant Adobe Systems.
The second quarter also saw Duquesne slash its stake in the iShares MSCI Emerging Index fund, an exchange traded fund (ETF), by nearly two-thirds. It had become the portfolio’s second largest long position in the first quarter when Duquesne more than quadrupled its investment, but is now the eighth largest. The ETF tracks the performance of large- and mid-cap emerging market equities.
The largest position Duquesne liquidated in the second quarter was the iShares NASDAQ Biotechnology ETF, an exchanged-traded fund which tracks an index of biotech and pharmaceutical stocks listed on the NASDAQ. It had previously ranked as the portfolio’s eleventh-largest long.
Duquesne also bailed out of the Class-A shares of Alphabet, which previously ranked twelfth.
