An elite hedge fund slashed its Nvidia and Tesla bets last quarter — and boosted its GameStop stake
Slaven Vlasic/Getty Images; Chelsea Jia Feng/BI
- Renaissance Technologies pared its Tesla and Nvidia bets and raised its GameStop wager last quarter.
- The quant fund founded by the late Jim Simons cut its Tesla stake by 86% and halved its Nvidia wager.
- RenTech boosted its GameStop position by more than 40% to 1.9 million shares.
Renaissance Technologies cut its Tesla and Nvidia stakes and boosted its GameStop bet last quarter, it revealed in a portfolio update on Wednesday.
RenTech, one of the biggest and best-performing hedge funds in history, pared its Tesla bet from about 2.1 million shares to 284,000 — an 86% reduction.
The sales reduced the position's value from $406 million to $74 million even as Tesla stock gained 26% in the period. Elon Musk's automaker also dropped from its 10th-largest holding at the end of June to outside the top 200 at the end of September.
The quantitative fund halved its Nvidia wager to about 3.5 million shares, paring its value from $867 million to $428 million even as the chipmaker's shares gained 20%. Nvidia fell from its third-largest holding to tenth.
Tesla and Nvidia have been two of the world's hottest stocks this year, rising 33% and 195% respectively as traders bet they'll blaze trails in the artificial intelligence race.
The buzz has only grown in recent weeks with Musk's emergence as a key advisor to President-elect Trump, and signs of strong demand for Nvidia's new Blackwell chip.
Algorithms
RenTech was founded by Wall Street legend Jim Simons, the former MIT math professor and Cold War codebreaker who died in May. The firm relies on algorithms to determine many of its trades, often resulting in sweeping changes to its stock portfolio each quarter.
The overall stock portfolio rose in value by 13% to $66.5 billion last quarter. Its largest positions were a $1.4 billion stake in Palantir, the software company cofounded by tech billionaire Peter Thiel, and a $975 million position in Novo Nordisk, the Danish pharmaceuticals giant behind Ozempic, the blockbuster weight-loss drug.
RenTech ramped up its GameStop bet by more than 40% to 1.9 million shares, worth $44 million at the quarter's close. It built a stake of 1 million shares in the video game retailer from scratch in the first quarter, meaning it likely benefited from the meme stock's explosive rally earlier this year.
It's worth underscoring that quarterly portfolio updates only give a snapshot of a firm's holdings on a particular date and exclude shares sold short, private investments, and overseas wagers.
They don't always paint a full picture of the investing strategy behind the picks — especially when algorithms are driving the trades.