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From the Wall Street Journal, August 13th, 2026. Bill Ackman calls his new fund's slumping stock price, quote, frankly absurd. The billionaire investor's portfolio has trailed the broader market since he took the fund and his firm public in April. Bill Ackman, the billionaire investor who runs the firm Pershing Square, held his first earnings call on Thursday since he staged a simultaneous public listing of a new fund, Pershing Square USA, and his management company.
The news he had to address is that his stock-picking funds are trailing the broader market so far this year. His answer is a portfolio makeover, and he is hoping it can turn things around. That means fresh bets on companies such as Netflix and Visa. The numbers explain the urgency. Start with the benchmark.
The S&P 500 delivered a 13.7% total return over the period through Tuesday. Pershing Square USA, known by its ticker PSUS, gained only 0.6% on its investments from its debut in late April through Tuesday. Against 13.7% for the index, that is essentially flat. His London-listed fund, Pershing Square Holdings, did worse.
It lost more than 4% this year through Tuesday. And here is the number Ackman objects to most. Most closed-end funds trade at a discount to the value of their underlying positions, but PSUS is an outlier. Its 22% discount was one of the widest of any US closed-end fund invested in public securities, according to the fund's semi-annual report.
Three things went wrong. First, his funds sat out the rally in the shares of chipmakers and other providers of artificial intelligence infrastructure, the rally that carried market indexes higher. Second, long-time holdings like Fannie Mae and Universal Music Group subtracted from his performance. Third, Ackman acknowledged mistakes in how the initial public offering itself was handled.
Much of the offering was allocated to individual investors who may have received more stock than expected and who then sold it. Ackman told analysts he is unhappy with what he called the {quote} frankly absurd way in which shares in PSUS are trading. On the timing, he was blunter. {quote} It was an ideal environment to take PSUS public in terms of the ability to deploy capital in a volatile market, he said, not the ideal environment to launch something new that no one's ever heard of before, which brings us to what he bought with that capital.
Ackman made his name as an activist investor, but for the past several years he has focused on friendly concentrated stakes held for long periods. He seized on this year's market turbulence and the billions of dollars raised in the PSUS offering to take new positions in six companies. Two are the card networks Visa and Mastercard.
Two more are financial services providers S&P Global and Intercontinental Exchange. The fifth is Alcon, an eye care company. And the sixth is Netflix. He had placed a big bet on it in 2022 only to walk away months later after it reported a loss in subscribers and a plan to introduce advertising. Now Ackman and Chief Investment Officer Ryan Israel write that Netflix has effectively won the streaming wars and can outspend rivals on content while spreading the cost across the industry's largest user base.
The stake was worth $225 million as of June 30th. The six new positions came on top of big ticket bets on Meta Platforms and Microsoft earlier this year. On the other side of the ledger, he sold Pershing Square Holdings stakes in Universal Music and Alphabet in the first half of the year and exited its position in Hertz in July.
So, what is the fix? Ackman said an active marketing program for PSUS would begin shortly with the goal of generating demand for the fund, especially among financial advisors, and narrowing that 22% discount. He also told shareholders they could help by spreading the word. And he said he plans to launch a fund focused on venture investments.
All of it sits on a business that now manages around $22 billion in fee-paying assets. The bottom line, as Ackman himself framed it, the turbulence gave him an ideal environment to put money to work. What it did not give him was a receptive audience for a brand new fund. By his own account, this was the wrong moment to launch something no one had ever heard of, and the 22% discount is the price of that timing.
That was Bill Ackman calls his new fund's slumping stock price frankly absurd from The Wall Street Journal.
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