Billionaire investor Stanley Druckenmiller sold Big Tech stocks in the last quarter after warning that there'll be a recession in 2023
- Stanley Druckenmiller dialed down on Big Tech holdings last quarter, according to a 13F filing Monday.
- Duquesne Family Office sold all of its Amazon shares and scaled back its stake in Microsoft, and bought pharmas.
Stanley Druckenmiller's family office ditched holdings in Big Tech last quarter, as the billionaire investor warned the US is headed for recession and stocks were stuck in a bear market.
Duquesne Family Office sold the entirety of its $199 million stake in Amazon and offloaded over one-quarter of its Microsoft shares in the three months ended June 30, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing released Monday.
The firm was similarly bearish on Big Tech in the first quarter, when it dumped its $274 million stake in Google parent Alphabet.
Big Tech stocks suffered a torrid second quarter as the Federal Reserve's aggressive interest rate rises spooked investors out of riskier assets. Amazon shares slid 35% in three months for their worst performance since 2001, while Microsoft posted its worst performance since 2010 with a 17% decline.
Druckenmiller has been managing his personal wealth through the family office since closing his hedge fund, Duquesne Capital, in 2010. The former lead portfolio manager for George Soros' Quantum Fund has a net worth of $10.1 billion, according to Bloomberg's Billionaires Index.
The investing legend has laid out a pessimistic investing thesis this year. In June, he said it was probable the bear market in stocks was already six months old and still had a way to run.
"Given the extent of the asset bubble and the destruction in the markets, given what's going on in Ukraine, given zero Covid policy in China, I don't take a lot of comfort from that," he said at the time, at the Sohn Investment Conference. "So I assume, and pretty strongly, soon we're going to have a recession sometime in 2023."
But Druckenmiller did back out of the first-quarter bet he made against the S&P 500, Duquesne's latest SEC filing shows. The firm sold all of its 2,396 put contracts on the SPDR S&P 500 ETF, a fund that tracks the benchmark US index.
Meanwhile, Duquesne built up significant stakes in the pharmaceutical companies Eli Lilly and Moderna during the second quarter, as well as scooping up shares of cybersecurity company Crowdstrike.