3 Stocks Billionaire Dan Loeb Bought in Q3 (and 2 He Dumped)

Billionaire Dan Loeb, the founder of $18 billion hedge fund Third Point, is mired in a fourth-straight year of trailing the market, though the activist fund did return a solid 18% last year when hedge funds collectively trailed the S&P 500 by a wide margin. Thanks to many years of such solid returns during its 23-year history, Loeb has built an estimated $3.1 billion personal fortune, which ranks him 712th on Forbes’ list of the world’s richest people.

Loeb’s activist fund, which is named after a surfing spot in Malibu (which explains the seeming randomness of him surfing in our caricature of him below), tries to work constructively with management teams but is not afraid to mix it up with recalcitrant companies either. The fund earned two high-profile activist victories within the past month alone, convincing United Technologies Corporation (NYSE:UTX) to split into twain, while also winning two seats on the board of embattled food company Campbell Soup Company (NYSE:CPB).

In the third quarter, Third Point sold out of 14 positions while replacing them with just half as many new ones. Despite that, the value of the fund’s 13F portfolio ticked down only slightly, to $14.31 billion, from the all-time high of $14.35 billion it reached in the middle of this year. Third Point’s exposure to healthcare stocks rose by 6.56 percentage points during Q3 to 27.71%, while communications stocks fell by 7.64 percentage points to 14.83% weighting.

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On the next page we’ll check out Dan Loeb’s five biggest moves of the third quarter, which included him selling off a stock he had just bought in Q2.