- Steve Cohen's Point72 ramped up its Tesla bet and snapped up GameStop shares last quarter.
- The hedge fund built a $108 million stake in the carmaker, and a $11 million stake in the retailer.
Steve Cohen's Point72 supersized its bet on Elon Musk's Tesla last quarter, and made an unexpected wager on GameStop stock.
The billionaire investor's hedge fund purchased nearly 878,000 Tesla shares, worth $108 million as of December 31. It also held bullish call options on another 60,500 shares of the automaker at the year's end, a Securities and Exchange Commission filing revealed Tuesday.
Point72 didn't own any Tesla shares directly, and only held calls on 50,000 shares, at the end of September. Three months later, the electric-vehicle company ranked in the top 60 of nearly 1,500 holdings in Point72's US stock portfolio.
Cohen and his colleagues also warmed to perhaps the ultimate meme stock: GameStop. The New York Mets owner and his team scooped up 606,000 shares of the video-game retailer, a stake worth $11 million as of December 31.
GameStop shares briefly skyrocketed from under $5 to over $80 in January 2021, boosting the company's market capitalization from below $2 billion to north of $22 billion. Retail investors fueled the buying frenzy, and soon piled into other beaten-down stocks, as they looked to get rich quick and punish the short sellers betting against some of their favorite companies.
The overall value of Point72's portfolio jumped by 17% to $29 billion last quarter. The fund's number-one position was Meta Platforms at year end, thanks to Cohen and his team more than doubling their stake in Facebook's parent company to about 4.7 million shares.
Point72 made several other notable changes to its holdings. For example, it raised its Amazon stake from 1.8 million shares to just over 5 million shares, valued at $424 million on December 31. It also went from zero Netflix shares to 719,000 in the period, giving it a $212 million stake in the video-streaming service.
Cohen's fund pursued a strikingly different strategy to Chanos & Company last quarter. Short seller Jim Chanos' fund ramped up its bet against Tesla, and purchased bearish put options on two meme stocks, AMC Entertainment and Digital World Acquisition Corporation — the SPAC linked to the former US president, Donald Trump.