High-Profile Investor Bill Ackman Liquidates Coronavirus Hedges, Invests $2 Billion-Plus in Bargain Stocks

Billionaire investor Bill Ackman has liquidated the sizeable coronavirus hedges his firm, Pershing Square, built at the beginning of March. Essentially, Ackman has called a temporary market bottom, and quickly redirected most of the $2 billion-plus windfall from those investments into a basket of stocks that are now trading at bargain-bin discounts.

In a letter to Pershing Square investors, Ackman said that the market hedges had served their purpose and generated substantial profits in just a couple of weeks. The coronavirus pandemic is nowhere near its conclusion, and Ackman suggests that what the United States needs now is a 30-day lockdown imposed at the federal level.

Pershing directed some of the proceeds from those hedges into funding Covaxx, a small biomedical company recently formed as a subsidiary of closely-held United Biomedical. Covaxx has already produced and delivered more than 100,000 coronavirus testing kits in China and America, and with the help of Pershing's funding, it hopes to scale up its manufacturing rapidly and deliver hundreds of millions more.

Source Fool.com