Jim Simons' RenTech fund tripled its AMC stake last quarter - and slashed its Tesla holdings by 75%

• Jim Simons' RenTech tripled its AMC stake and slashed its Tesla holdings by 75% last quarter.
• The hedge fund's bet on the movie-theater chain soared almost 20-fold in value to $103 million.
• RenTech held $138 million of Tesla stock, a fraction of its previous stake worth $14 billion today.

Renaissance Technologies, one of the biggest and best-performing hedge funds in history, more than tripled its stake in AMC Entertainment and slashed its Tesla holdings by 75% in the second quarter.

RenTech, founded by the former NSA codebreaker and MIT math professor Jim Simons, held about 516,000 AMC shares at the end of March this year. It raised its bet on the cinema chain - a firm favorite of meme-stock traders - to 1.8 million shares last quarter, regulatory filings show.

The value of RenTech's AMC stake ballooned almost 20-fold to $103 million in the three months to June 30. That reflected the fund's share purchases, as well as the movie-theater group's stock price jumping almost 500% to $57.

RenTech may have warmed to AMC last quarter, but it cooled on Tesla. It cut its position in Elon Musk's electric-vehicle company from about 827,000 shares to 204,000 shares, reducing the value of its stake from $553 million to $138 million.

RenTech, a quantitative fund that trusts algorithms to decide many of its trades, has owned significantly more shares of both companies in recent years. For example, it held nearly 3.5 million AMC shares at the half-year mark in 2019, which would have been worth almost $200 million two years later. It also owned a split-adjusted 20 million Tesla shares at the end of 2019, which would be valued at $14 billion today.

The top three holdings in RenTech's $80 billion stock portfolio at the end of June were a $1.8 billion stake in Novo-Nordisk, an almost $1 billion stake in Verisign, and a $810 million position in Zoom. The fund boosted its Nvidia position by 150% and grew its Amazon stake by about 16-fold last quarter, resulting in those two names replacing Monster Beverage and Target as its fourth- and fifth-largest positions.