Andreas Halvorsen’s Viking Global Investors took new positions in a pair of attention-grabbing stocks, AMD and Albemarle , last quarter. Halvorsen, whose firm has about $52 billion in assets under management, bought more than 1.9 million shares of chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices, valued at the end of the first quarter at $123 million. The stock has rallied more than 58% this year amid growing confidence in the business outlook around artificial intelligence. He also built a 337,000-share stake in lithium stock Albemarle. The stock has slipped this year as the price of lithium slid, but many on Wall Street are bullish on the stock as demand improves in China and elsewhere for electric vehicles , which use the chemical in batteries. Elsewhere, the Norwegian hedge fund manager increased his holdings in tech, insurance and financial stocks such as Amazon (up 34%), Micron (+54%), UnitedHealth (+264%) and Visa (+8%). Halvorsen zeroed out his prior holdings in stocks including Alibaba , Domino’s Pizza , Match Group , ServiceNow and PayPal . Visa was Viking Global’s top holding in the quarter, with a $1.48 billion position. The payment stock is up 11% this year, bucking a 7% decline in the S & P 500 Financials Index. A 46% increase to Halvorsen’s McKesson stake put the stock in the number two slot among his biggest holdings, at $1.14 billion. But Halvorsen’s buy into McKesson, which is up almost 6% year to date, differed from other big investors. Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway decreased its position by about 20% in the last quarter. Of Halvorsen’s top 10 holdings, all were increased stakes in the quarter besides Amazon, which was cut almost 40%. Lululemon was the only new holding in the quarter to make the list of top 10 largest. Money managers who oversee more than $100 million in assets must disclose long positions to the Securities and Exchange Commission 45 days after the end of a quarter. That makes it possible that Halvorsen has already made changes to his holdings in the current quarter.
Source link
