Hedge fund billionaires Cohen, Tepper bail on Alibaba
Hedge fund billionaires Steve Cohen and David Tepper sold their entire stakes in e-commerce giant Alibaba last quarter, along with more than a dozen other hedge funds.
In all, 20 investors booted Alibaba from their portfolios by the end of December — including a whopping 19 hedge funds, according to data from financial research firm FactSet.
Their exit was fortuitously timed, allowing secretive hedge funds to avoid stock drops in January tied to disappointing earnings and concerns over a probe by a Chinese regulator into bribes and fake goods sold on the site.
Alibaba raised $25 billion last year in the biggest initial public offering in history. It’s stock, which trades on the New York Stock Exchange, is down 13.4% this year.
The stock closed trading on Wednesday down 11 cents, or 0.1%, at $86.74.
Cohen’s Point72’s Asia fund sold 500,000 shares. Tepper’s Appaloosa Management sold 725,000 shares, while Eric Mindich’s Eton Park sold 1.2 million shares.
Other hedge fund exits include Farallon Capital, which sold 530,800 shares, and Leon Cooperman’s Omega Advisors, which dropped 410,000 shares.
Of course, some hedge funds also bought shares of Alibaba over the same period for the first time. Those include Tiger Global Management, Tudor Investments and Och-Ziff Capital Management.
Investors who exited Alibaba were dominated by hedge funds, while new entrants to the stock included a wider array of investors, including mutual fund firm Janus Capital, which picked up 3.4 million shares.
USAA Investment Manage- ment, which offers financial planning for military families, bought 428,802 shares.
Among hedge funds that bought for the first time was Chase Coleman’s Tiger Global, which added a whopping 5.8 million. Paul Tudor Jones’ Tudor Investments picked up 520,750 shares, while OZ Management, a unit of the publicly traded OchZiff Capital, bought 1 million shares.
Billionaire investor George Soros, meanwhile, kept his 4.4 million stake, worth $382 million, unchanged last quarter, according to FactSet.