Duquesne Family Office was formed when decided to close the doors of his hedge fund Duquesne Capital to the outside investors in 2010 and to return client money. As per the news at that time, Druckenmiller was exhausted from the pressure of trying to keep up with one of the best track records in the industry while handling huge capital. Hence, he closed the fund that has been running for 29 years (it was founded back in 1981) and had $12 billion in assets, and turned it into a family office, which, interestingly, still issues quarterly 13Fs. Druckenmiller also managed money for George Soros from 1988 till 2000, as he was Portfolio Manager of Quantum Fund. While at Soros, he played an important role in 1992 when the fund made a $1 billion worth successful bet against the British pound. Currently, his net worth is assessed by Forbes at $4.6 billion. Druckenmiller graduated with a BA in English and Economics from Bowdoin College, and he decided to drop a three-year Ph.D. program in Economics at the University of Michigan in order to take a position of an oil analyst for Pittsburgh National Bank. In this article, we are going to highlight Duquesne Family Office’s most important portfolio changes in the first quarter of 2019.
Insider Monkey’s flagship strategy identifies the best performing 100 hedge funds at the end of each quarter and invests in their consensus stock picks. This way it is always invested in the best ideas of the best performing hedge funds and is able to generate much higher returns than the market. Since its inception in May 2014, our flagship strategy generated a cumulative return of 103%, beating the S&P 500 ETF (SPY) by nearly 38 percentage points (see the details here). Our best performing hedge funds strategy also returned 26.4% year-to-date and outperformed the S&P 500 Index by nearly 12 percentage points. We take a closer look at hedge funds like Duquesne Family Office in order to identify their best and worst ideas.
On March 31st, 2019, Duquesne Family Office’s equity portfolio was valued $3.45 billion, which is almost double the value it had at the end of the previous quarter ($1.73 billion). Among the top new positions were T-Mobile US, Inc. (NASDAQ:TMUS), The Home Depot, Inc. (NYSE:HD), General Electric Company (NYSE:GE), Mastercard Incorporated (NYSE:MA), Visa Inc. (NYSE:V), and QUALCOMM Incorporated (NASDAQ:QCOM). During the quarter, the fund raised its stakes in Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT), iShares MSCI Emerging Markets ETF (NYSE:EEM), Alibaba Group Holding Limited (NYSE:BABA), Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN), Netflix, Inc. (NASDAQ:NFLX), and Adobe Inc. (NASDAQ:ADBE).
There were also stocks in which Duquesne Family Office starter to lose faith and decided to lower its stakes during Q1, and those included Coupa Software Incorporated (NASDAQ:COUP), Workday, Inc. (NASDAQ:WDAY), AC Immune SA (NASDAQ:ACIU), and Okta, Inc. (NASDAQ:OKTA). And, the positions the fund completely sold out in the quarter counted those in salesforce.com, inc. (CRM), Gilead Sciences, Inc. (NASDAQ:GILD), Medtronic plc (NYSE:MDT), Delta Air Lines, Inc. (NYSE:DAL), American Airlines Group Inc. (NASDAQ:AAL), and Kohl’s Corporation (NYSE:KSS).
Disclosure: None.
This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.
