Important data releases aren’t hard to come by on Wall Street. For roughly six weeks every quarter, an overwhelming majority of the stock market’s most-influential businesses report their operating results. Were this not enough, economic data is announced Monday through Friday. All of this news can make it easy for something important to slip through the cracks.
For instance, while most investors were keeping a watchful eye on the July inflation report in mid-August, they may have missed the Aug. 14 deadline for institutional money managers to file Form 13F with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). A 13F provides an under-the-hood look at which stocks Wall Street’s most prominent money managers purchased and sold in the latest quarter (in this case, the June-ended quarter).
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As you can imagine, no asset manager is more-closely followed than Warren Buffett. Since taking the reins at Berkshire Hathaway nearly 60 years ago, he’s led his company’s Class A shares to an aggregate gain that’s nearing 5,600,000%. But there are other superstar money managers beyond the Oracle of Omaha who rightly garner attention.
Billionaire David Tepper of Appaloosa Management is a perfect example. Tepper, who co-founded Appaloosa more than three decades ago, is known for his contrarian views and outsized investment returns.
Although Tepper runs a relatively concentrated portfolio that typically holds around three-dozen securities, he and his team are regularly adding to and reducing these existing positions. Based on Appaloosa’s 13Fs, Tepper has been a decisive seller of Wall Street’s hottest artificial intelligence (AI) stock, Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA), and has been piling into what’s historically been one of China’s most-consistent growth stocks.
There’s no denying that AI is a mammoth opportunity for corporate America and Wall Street. In Sizing the Prize, the analysts at PwC predicted AI would add a staggering $15.7 trillion to the global economy by 2030. But this hasn’t stopped billionaire David Tepper from cashing in his chips.
At the end of September 2023, Tepper’s fund held 10.25 million shares of Nvidia. Note, this figure has been adjusted to account for Nvidia’s historic 10-for-1 stock split, which occurred after the close of trading on June 7, 2024. But as of June 30, Appaloosa’s stake in the company had been whittled down to just 690,000 shares, representing a reduction of approximately 93%!
