Jim Simons' RenTech fund nearly doubled its AMC stake, reinvested in GameStop, and trimmed its Tesla bet last quarter

• Renaissance Technologies grew its AMC stake, bet on GameStop, and cut its Tesla wager last quarter.
• Jim Simons' hedge fund boosted its AMC position by about 800% in the nine months to December 31.

Renaissance Technologies nearly doubled its AMC Entertainment stake, reinvested in GameStop, and trimmed its Tesla position in the fourth quarter of 2021, a Securities and Exchange Commission filing revealed this week.

RenTech, one of the biggest and best-performing hedge funds in history, was founded by Jim Simons, a former NSA codebreaker and MIT math professor. The quantitative fund trusts algorithms to decide many of its trades, resulting in significant changes to its portfolio each quarter.

Simons' fund ramped up its AMC bet by 87% to 4.7 million shares last quarter. It tripled its stake in the movie-theater chain in the second quarter of 2021, then boosted it by almost 40% in the third quarter, meaning it has now increased it nine-fold in the space of nine months.

AMC's stock price dropped 28% last quarter, meaning the value of RenTech's stake rose by only one-third to $127 million in the period. The fund's 4.7 million shares would have been worth $339 million at the cinema chain's record intraday high of $73 last June, when the hype around the meme stock was at its peak.

RenTech also disclosed a holding of 2,600 GameStop shares worth about $400,000 at the end of December, after exiting the stock in the third quarter. The fund previously owned 5.1 million shares of the video-game retailer at the midpoint of 2019, which would have been worth upwards of $1.5 billion for a brief moment in January 2021, when a short squeeze catapulted GameStop shares into the stratosphere.

Simons' fund reversed course on Tesla last quarter. After quadrupling its stake in Elon Musk's electric-vehicle company in the third quarter of 2021, it trimmed its position by 9% to about 743,000 shares last quarter.

However, Tesla stock surged 36% in the three months to December 31, boosting the value of RenTech's position by 25% to $786 million despite the fund's share sales. The automaker was its sixth-most-valuable holding at the end of December, up from 12th on the list three months earlier.

The overall value of RenTech's US stock portfolio climbed about 4% to $80 billion last quarter. Its biggest holdings included a $2.1 billion stake in Novo-Nordisk, roughly $1 billion stakes in Atlassian and Verisign, and almost $800 million positions in each of Kroger, Microsoft, and Tesla.