Soros Fund Management adds popular tech names, BlackRock in second quarter

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Soros Fund Management LLC added Facebook Inc (FB.O), Apple Inc (AAPL.O) and Twitter Inc (TWTR.N), but trimmed stakes in Alphabet Inc (GOOGL.O) and Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O) in the quarter through June, according to a regulatory filing on Tuesday.

Billionaire hedge fund manager George Soros speaks during a discussion at the Clinton Global Initiative's annual meeting in New York, September 27, 2015. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid/File Photo

The family office of billionaire George Soros also bought stakes in AT&T Inc (T.N), Chevron Corp (CVX.N) and T-Mobile US Inc (TMUS.O) and divested stakes in eBay Inc (EBAY.O), Nvidia Corp (NVDA.O), Snap Inc (SNAP.N) and Paypal Holdings Inc (PYPL.O).

Soros Fund Management also dramatically boosted its shares in BlackRock Inc (BLK.N) - the world’s largest asset management firm, overseeing $6 trillion - by nearly 60 percent to 12,983 total shares in the second quarter.

Other notable adjustments included paring stakes in Netflix Inc (NFLX.O), Citigroup Inc (C.N) and Wells Fargo & Co (WFC.N), but raising its shares of Pandora Media Inc (P.N) and Salesforce.com Inc (CRM.N).

Soros Fund Management took share stakes in Facebook of 159,200 class A shares during the second quarter and 54,500 shares in Apple.

A number of prominent fund managers sharply cut their holdings in Apple only weeks before it became the first publicly-traded U.S. company to be worth more than $1 trillion.

Einhorn’s Greenlight Capital slashed its stake by 77 percent, while Philippe Laffont’s Coatue Management unloaded 95 percent. Advisory firm Diamond Hill Capital Management cut its stake by 27 percent.

Other big holders, including Sanders Capital and Adage Capital Partners, only trimmed small amounts in the second quarter.

Soros also rejigged his energy holdings, raising stakes in Devon Energy Corp (DVN.N) and Kinder Morgan Inc (KMI.N), while dissolving his stake in the VanEck Vectors Oil Services ETF (OIH.P) and cutting exposure to Canadian Natural Resources Ltd (CNQ.TO) and Williams Companies Inc (WMB.N).

Quarterly disclosures of hedge fund managers’ stock holdings, in what are known as 13F filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, are one of the few public ways of learning what the managers are selling and buying.

But relying on the filings to develop an investment strategy comes with some risk because the disclosures come 45 days after the end of each quarter and may not reflect current positions. Still, the filings offer a glimpse into what hedge fund managers saw as opportunities to make money on the long side.

The filings do not disclose short positions, or bets that a stock will fall in price. As a result, the public filings do not always present a complete picture of a management firm’s equities holdings.

Reporting by Jennifer Ablan; additional reporting by Trevor Hunnicutt, editing by G Crosse

(Original source)