Ackman’s Pershing Touts Value Investing Amid Bid to Stir Demand for Funds
Pershing took on six new holdings in the second quarter including Netflix, Mastercard and Visa, eye care firm Alcon, and S&P Global.
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Back to Pershing Square one? It’s been a busy year for Bill Ackman. In addition to listing his alternative asset manager Pershing Square and its new stock-picking fund Pershing Square USA, he abandoned a $1.5 billion position in Universal Music after the company said no to a $65 billion takeover.
On Thursday, he revealed one of the biggest shakeups at those funds in years, writing that Pershing took on six new holdings in the second quarter: Netflix, Mastercard and Visa, eye care firm Alcon, exchange operator Intercontinental, and financial data provider S&P Global. You can expect to hear a lot about it.
V for Value
Ackman stands out among his peers in social media visibility. His 3 million X followers make him one of the world’s most visible stockpickers, on top of having the battle scars of activist victories (Canadian Pacific Railway, Chipotle) and defeats (Herbalife, JCPenny) to prove his Wall Street bona fides. Just don’t let being extremely online or swashbuckling activism deceive: Ackman is an old-school value investor at heart. Pershing’s latest portfolio additions, Ackman emphasized in a shareholder letter Thursday, are set for good old-fashioned growth, that most reliable driver of long-term investment value.
Visa and Mastercard are “among the highest-quality businesses in the world,” he wrote, and investor fears they will be disrupted by stablecoins or agentic commerce are overblown. Netflix, he argued, “has effectively won the streaming wars,” while Alcon, the world’s biggest standalone ophthalmology company, is poised for consistent long-term growth due to aging population demographics. Now, Pershing could use some investors willing to get behind these things:
- Pershing Square USA raised $5 billion in an April IPO but has underperformed since. As a closed-end fund, it issued a set number of shares, which trade based on investor demand that has, so far, proven thin.
- Pershing USA is trading at a discount of 22% to its portfolio value, which Ackman named its “biggest challenge,” noting it’s among the widest discounts among US closed-end funds.
As Advertised: Promotional tweets alone won’t fix things. Ackman said Pershing plans to launch an “active marketing program” for Pershing USA, and admitted “we clearly need to do a better job of generating demand for our funds.”
