William Ackman became a billionaire through operating the Pershing Square Capital Management hedge fund that he founded in 2004. He became famous in the financial world for his short position on bond insurer MBIA and his rescue of mall operator General Growth early on in his investment career.
Bill Ackman is ranked #368 in 2021 on the Forbes 400 with a $3.1 billion net worth that is up $1 billion from 2020.
His approach is mostly as a contrarian trader and investor betting against companies by going short their stock when they are popular but sees flaws in their business models. He also goes long stocks when they are not popular and he sees value in their stock price versus the business and all little remaining risk to the downside.
He has been an activist investor in the past trying to create change through his vocal involvement with the companies he has large investment positions in and will also publicly explain his short positions based on a companies flawed business model.
Bill Ackman has had both big wins and also big losses in his professional investing and trading career and many have been very entertaining to watch play out in real time as he is so public about them. They can be especially interesting to watch when other big traders take a counter position against him. The 2016 documentary Betting on Zero was very entertaining to watch as it showed his public journey of short selling the company Herbalife in his bet against their whole business model.
Below is the current Pershing Square Capital Management LLC Holdings in 2021 after his update at the end of Q3 as of 09/30/21. This is a breakdown of his trading and investing portfolio positions from his fund’s most recent 13F filings.
Pershing Square currently manages a total portfolio value of $9,463,494,000 in assets under management with six stock positions with capital allocated as shown below.
Ticker – Company – Portfolio%
LOW – Lowe’s Cos. 21.94%
CMG – Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc. 21.41%
HLT – Hilton Worldwide Holdings 17.99%
QSR – Restaurant Brands International 15.48%
HHC – Howard Hughes Corp. 12.64%
DPZ – Dominos Pizza Inc. 10.54%
