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Globe and Mail
a day ago
- Business
- Globe and Mail
Billionaire Investors Are Buying These 3 Artificial Intelligence (AI) Stocks Hand Over Fist
If you follow the world's wealthiest investors, you'll see a wide range of investing styles. Some focus on valuation. Others prioritize growth potential. A few look for arbitrage opportunities. But there's at least one common denominator among many ultrarich investors these days: They like artificial intelligence (AI) stocks. Billionaires are buying these three AI stocks hand over fist. Where to invest $1,000 right now? Our analyst team just revealed what they believe are the 10 best stocks to buy right now. Learn More » 1. Alphabet Google parent Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOG)(NASDAQ: GOOGL) stands out as a top pick for several billionaire investors. Izzy Englander might be the most bullish about the tech stock. His Millennium Management hedge fund upped its position in Alphabet by 150.8% in the first quarter of 2025. Ken Griffin is another billionaire hedge fund manager who's enthusiastic about Alphabet stock. His Citadel Advisors increased its stake in the tech giant by 55.7% in Q1. Appaloosa's David Tepper also bought over 128,000 additional shares of Alphabet, bumping up his holding in the stock by 6.8%. What do these billionaire investors like about Alphabet? Its valuation is probably near the top of the list. The stock trades at a forward price-to-earnings ratio below 19. None of the other so-called "Magnificent Seven" stocks comes anywhere close to such an attractive valuation. Alphabet has also been showing that it's playing to win in the AI space. The company's Google Gemini 2.5 Pro ranks No. 1 overall on the LMArena leaderboard. Google Cloud continues to be the fastest-growing of the top three cloud service providers. 2. Amazon There isn't as much of a consensus among billionaire investors when it comes to Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN). Chase Coleman's Tiger Global Management upped its stake in the e-commerce and cloud service giant by 2.7% in Q1 and Englander's Millennium Management boosted its position in Amazon by 5.3%. However, Griffin's Citadel Advisors reduced its Amazon holding by 43.5%. Tepper's Appaloosa trimmed its position in Amazon by 3.5%. But one billionaire loaded up on Amazon stock in the first quarter. George Soros bought more than 101,000 shares, increasing his hedge fund's stake in Amazon by 30.5%. Amazon is now the 11th largest holding in Soros Fund Management's $5.61 billion portfolio. Soros probably likes Amazon's bottom-line improvement. In Q1, the company's earnings soared 64% year over year to $17.1 billion. Amazon has been laser-focused on improving profitability -- and its efforts are clearly paying off. Amazon has also flexed its AI muscle. The company's Amazon Web Services unit still commands the largest market share in cloud services, thanks in part to its Amazon Bedrock platform that supports multiple AI models. Amazon recently introduced Alexa+, its next-generation AI assistant. 3. Meta Platforms Meta Platforms (NASDAQ: META) elicits different views among billionaire investors as well. It's still the largest holding for Coleman's Tiger Global, but the hedge fund didn't buy or sell shares of Meta in Q1. Englander and Griffin seemed to sour on Meta somewhat, though, slashing their positions in the stock by 38.9% and 44.2%, respectively. However, Tepper increased Appaloosa's stake in Meta by 12.2%, making it his portfolio's fifth largest holding. Steve Cohen, though, stood out as the biggest Meta bull in Q1. His Point 72 Asset Management increased its position in the Facebook and Instagram parent by a whopping 585%. What might Cohen find so appealing about Meta? It could simply be the company's continued strength in the advertising market. A staggering 3.43 billion people used Meta's family of apps daily in Q1. The average price per ad shown to those users increased by 10% year over year. I suspect that Cohen is enthusiastic about Meta's AI initiatives as well. Meta AI now has nearly 1 billion monthly active users. The company is also a leader in AI-powered smart glasses. CEO Mark Zuckerberg believes that glasses are "the ideal form factor" for AI. Should you invest $1,000 in Meta Platforms right now? Before you buy stock in Meta Platforms, consider this: The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the 10 best stocks for investors to buy now… and Meta Platforms wasn't one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years. Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $658,297!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $883,386!* Now, it's worth noting Stock Advisor 's total average return is992% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to172%for the S&P 500. Don't miss out on the latest top 10 list, available when you join Stock Advisor. See the 10 stocks » *Stock Advisor returns as of June 9, 2025 Suzanne Frey, an executive at Alphabet, is a member of The Motley Fool's board of directors. Randi Zuckerberg, a former director of market development and spokeswoman for Facebook and sister to Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg, is a member of The Motley Fool's board of directors. John Mackey, former CEO of Whole Foods Market, an Amazon subsidiary, is a member of The Motley Fool's board of directors. Keith Speights has positions in Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta Platforms. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta Platforms. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
Business Insider
11-06-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
Hedge fund giants are backing more external fund managers. Here's why smaller rivals are doing the opposite.
The hedge fund talent war means profit-generating portfolio managers have more options than ever. In an industry run by savvy billionaires, rank-and-file traders have had the upper hand in recent years thanks to what Millennium founder Izzy Englander deemed a " talent bubble" in 2023. Multistrategy firms, which blend a variety of investment strategies within a single fund, are catering to top PMs' whims, opening offices in places like Dubai and Puerto Rico so employees can avoid the taxman, or letting top traders run capital externally in their own funds. A report from data provider With Intelligence found that multistrategy platforms have put $55 billion to work in external managers, with firms like Millennium, Qube, and Schonfeld leading the way. But as the industry's largest players partner with new launches and external money managers, smaller platforms are drawing in portfolio managers who want a semblance of autonomy in addition to the benefits of working within a broader organization. Smaller managers can offer a more boutique feel for traders who feel constrained by the biggest multistrategy funds, which one allocator previous described as " skill factories" that don't rely on a single star. Adrian Brummer, a partner at $12 billion Brummer & Partners, a Swedish alternative investment manager, told Business Insider that the firm has four internal portfolio managers and expects that to grow to "six or more during this year." Brummer has more investment strategies run via external partnerships than internal PMs, but traders working in-house can be more efficient and easier to aboard, Brummer said. "A pod structure also allows us to access more capacity-constrained strategies," Brummer wrote in an email. A focus on talent Brummer isn't the only platform known for investing in external firms and managers that is flipping its model. A person close to the $6 billion alternative manager New Holland said the firm is in the early stages of adding internal portfolio managers to its multi-strategy offering. The firm began as an investment advisor for Dutch pension plans and has since become independent. It just hired former Brevan Howard executive Stephan Brohme as chief risk officer to boost its "operational infrastructure," a press release said. "His extensive experience and expertise working alongside investment teams to effectively mitigate and strategically manage risk will be a tremendous asset across our firm," New Holland CEO Scott Radke said in the release. London-based Bainbridge Partners, which started its multistrategy offering as a fund-of-funds in 2002, has added 10 internal investing pods over the last decade and plans to add more, according to Antoine Haddad, the founder of the $1 billion firm. "The focus is to bring in more strategies that make sense to internalize," Haddad wrote in an email, with a bias toward more niche options. At former Eisler portfolio manager Sean Gambino's new fund, Baypointe Partners, onetime Crestline executive Mark Walker is recreating an "old-school partnership," he told BI. Walker was a part of the leadership team at Crestline that turned the alternative manager's fund-of-funds business into a more modern multistrategy fund with some internal PMs. He is now the CEO of Baypointe and said he is targeting pod shop investors tired of the siloed structure found at many of the biggest platforms. He aims to build a "Seal Team 6" of senior PMs trading specific sectors, with a "completely transparent center book," which sits atop traders' portfolios and pulls its positions from them. Gambino is already trading consumer stocks, and Richard Shapiro, a former Millennium and Wexford Capital PM, will run the center book. "PMs want a level of independence but don't want to run a business," he said. While the biggest funds in the booming multistrategy space, which now manage more than $900 billion, according to research from Nasdaq's eVestment, can offer PMs more guaranteed compensation, there are levers smaller firms can pull to attract talent. A differentiator Brummer and Walker both mentioned is tailoring risk management limits to a PM's strategy and preference. It's an advantage that can only be offered by smaller firms, as the biggest funds have too many moving parts and people to make customized risk frameworks for each of their traders. "It's all about what you need to do to secure the best talent," said Matthew Glasofer, a partner at Corbin Capital Partners, a $9.6 billion alternative asset manager with a multistrategy fund that only invests in external PMs. Corbin is not yet bringing traders in-house, but Glasofer said, "We haven't shut the door on anything."
Business Insider
02-06-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
The biggest hedge funds made modest gains in May. How Citadel, Point72, and more stack up.
The flagship fund for $66 billion Citadel, Wellington, was up 0.2% in May pushing the fund's 2025 gains to 0.8%, a person close to the firm told Business Insider. Billionaire Steve Cohen 's Point72, meanwhile, returned 0.9% last month, bringing the $37.7 billion firm's yearly gains to 3.9%, an individual close to the firm said. Millennium, the $73 billion firm run by billionaire Izzy Englander, is now positive for the year at 0.4%, according to a person familiar. Billionaire Ken Griffin's Citadel and Millennium uncharacteristically lost money in back-to-back months in February and March, as President Donald Trump's policies rattled global markets. Stock markets have rebounded, with the S&P 500 in the black for 2025 now, thanks to the best May since 1990. The index returned 6.2% in May, the strongest individual monthly gain since November of 2023. ExodusPoint, the multistrategy firm founded by former Millennium executive Michael Gelband, has been a standout performer so far this year. After a 1% gain in May, the fund is up 7.5% for the year, outpacing Gelband's former firm. May's best performer among the multistrategy cohort is a $3 billion manager, Dymon Asia, which has teams based across different Asian and Middle East markets. It was up 3.3% for the month and 8% for the year, a person close to the manager said. The firms mentioned in the story and the table below declined to comment. The table will be updated as additional performance figures are learned. Fund May performance 2025 performance AQR Apex 2.4% 10.6% Dymon Asia 3.3% 8% ExodusPoint 1% 7.5% Walleye 1.1% 6.2% Man Group 1783 1.1% 5.4% Balyasny 1.4% 4.8% Schonfeld Partners 1.4% 4.7% LMR 1.3% 4.6% Point72 0.9% 3.9% Citadel Wellington 0.2% 0.8%
Business Insider
02-06-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
The biggest hedge funds made modest gains in May. How Citadel, Point72, and more stack up.
Multistrategy hedge funds protected their investors from the worst of 2025's stock market volatility in March and April. Now, after equity markets surged in May, the same managers also did not reach the same highs as indexes such as the S&P 500. The flagship fund for $66 billion Citadel, Wellington, was up 0.2% in May pushing the fund's 2025 gains to 0.8%, a person close to the firm told Business Insider. Billionaire Steve Cohen 's Point72, meanwhile, returned 0.9% last month, bringing the $37.7 billion firm's yearly gains to 3.9%, an individual close to the firm said. Millennium, the $73 billion firm run by billionaire Izzy Englander, is now positive for the year at 0.4%, according to a person familiar. Billionaire Ken Griffin's Citadel and Millennium uncharacteristically lost money in back-to-back months in February and March, as President Donald Trump's policies rattled global markets. Stock markets have rebounded, with the S&P 500 in the black for 2025 now, thanks to the best May since 1990. The index returned 6.2% in May, the strongest individual monthly gain since November of 2023. ExodusPoint, the multistrategy firm founded by former Millennium executive Michael Gelband, has been a standout performer so far this year. After a 1% gain in May, the fund is up 7.5% for the year, outpacing Gelband's former firm. May's best performer among the multistrategy cohort is a $3 billion manager, Dymon Asia, which has teams based across different Asian and Middle East markets. It was up 3.3% for the month and 8% for the year, a person close to the manager said. The firms mentioned in the story and the table below declined to comment. The table will be updated as additional performance figures are learned.
Forbes
16-05-2025
- Business
- Forbes
How A Soviet Refugee Became A Hedge Fund Billionaire
It's a cloudy March morning in Midtown Manhattan and Igor Tulchinsky is explaining from behind his wooden desk, between sips of coffee and long pauses to think, his latest algorithmic vision—the introduction of large language models for his hedge fund WorldQuant. 'The first thing that the LLM can do is it can structure data and 80% of data that's out there is unstructured,' says Tulchinsky, dressed in all black, his piercing blue eyes gleaming with excitement. 'It's like a free lunch.' Tulchinsky has spun his decades-long fixation with data into a Wall Street goldmine. The 58-year-old, who immigrated to the U.S. as a child from Belarus, has made a fortune in the obscure, highly technical world of quantitative investing. WorldQuant, which he owns, now manages $10 billion for billionaire Izzy Englander's much larger hedge fund Millennium Capital Management, which it spun out of in 2007. A separate entity, WorldQuant Millennium Advisors, which Tulchinsky and Englander cofounded, manages another $13 billion for outside investors. Between his equity stakes in the two firms and cash he's made for himself from trading, Tulchinsky is worth an estimated $1.7 billion. Igor Tulchinsky by Alexander Karnyukhin for Forbes Quants like Tulchinsky write computer code that automatically execute stock trades based on price signals. WorldQuant's specialty has long been in statistical arbitrage—algorithms, or what he calls 'alphas,' that exploit price inefficiencies between individual securities or entire equity portfolios. Those alphas execute all sorts of trades, including buying and selling stocks (long positions), betting against stocks (short selling), and a slew of more byzantine hedge fund strategies that remain confidential. Whether it's Trump's see-sawing tariffs policy or a tech company's quarterly earnings report, there's likely a WorldQuant alpha calculating how to make money from it. 'We trade the ripples, not the waves,' says Tulchinsky, whose funds likely execute hundreds of thousands of trades on a typical day. 'We have a stockpile of millions and millions of alphas.' Now Tulchinsky wants to turbocharge his alpha factory by pairing it with large-language models (think OpenAI's ChatGPT), which he believes can help build new and better algorithms. 'We can be using AI and LLMs to convert and discover alphas in different domains,' he says. 'Possibilities are endless. The LLMS are getting stronger and stronger.' While funds like WorldQuant have been employing AI tools for years – in research, in predictive modeling and in writing code – the use of LLMs to devise trading strategies is fairly novel. In a 46-page report on hedge funds' use of AI prepared last June by the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs (for which WorldQuant and other major players like Citadel and Renaissance Technologies participated), LLMs were mentioned only once. 'These sort of internal, proprietary LLM systems, that's sort of an underlooked factor in how investment firms, especially quant firms, can use AI,' says Francesco Fabozzi, research director at Yale's International Center for Finance. WorldQuant is well positioned to capitalize on LLMs. Sources close to the company tell Forbes it employs over 150 PhDs in math, computer science and related STEM fields. Beyond Tulchinsky's comments, the firm declined to provide specifics, though Fabozzi says it's likely a hedge fund like WorldQuant would tap an open-source LLM model, such as Facebook's Llama, and feed it with its existing algorithms, thus training it to discover and even write new algorithms on its own. 'You can take standard LLMs and you can combine it with extra information. We have a lot of internal information, ' says Tulchinsky. 'We can create this tool, which can answer very sophisticated questions for us.' Beyond alpha discovery, Tulchinsky wants to harness LLMs to boost his firm's research efforts. 'You can ask questions of the LLM. You can give it a model like the Ray Dalio world model, and then something happens: Japan drops interest rates, and you can say, 'Okay, using the Ray Dalio model, make predictions for how it will trickle through the world,' and it'll do that,' he says as a hypothetical example. (He doesn't want to share an actual example for competitive reasons). 'That becomes our own data that really nobody can replicate.' Sources familiar with the firm say that WorldQuant's deployment of LLMs is still in its early stages, but is actively being developed and rolled out. For someone like Tulchinksy, AI is not just a way to make money, but a means of thinking about the world, says Stanley McChrystal, the retired four-star U.S. Army General, who has been working with Tulchinsky as a consultant since 2015 and counts him as a friend: 'The ability to use data to predict things is sort of what makes him tick.' Says a grinning Tulchinsky, 'With the proliferation of data and AI, we're getting to the point where you can kind of quant everything.' Tulchinsky's data obsession likely took root in his unpredictable upbringing. Born in Minsk, Belarus in 1966, he grew up under the Communist regime of Pyotr Masherov, a Belarusian revolutionary turned Soviet politician. His parents, professional musicians, decided to leave their home country in 1977 when their only child was 11. 'Those days when you decided to leave you immediately lost your job, they branded you as traitors publicly,' he recalls. The Tulchinskys spent three months in Italy before they received asylum status in the United States. In America, they moved around, living in four different states by the time Tulchinsky was 17. 'It's a very transformational experience, when you give up all the things you've taken for granted,' he recalls of his childhood. 'You become less afraid of change, and kind of even get used to it.' Fascinated with computers from a young age, Tulchsinky was programming video games at 17. He received his B.S. and his M.A. in computer science from the University of Texas, followed by his M.B.A. in finance and entrepreneurship from the Wharton School. He began his career at AT&T Bell Laboratories (the wireless carrier's now-defunct research and development arm), before nabbing his first finance gig at Timber Hill, the options trading firm founded by fellow Soviet refugee Thomas Peterffy. 'Of course I remember Igor,' recalls 80-year-old Peterffy, who came to the U.S. from Hungary and later transformed Timber Hill into the stock brokerage giant Interactive Brokers, the source of his $60 billion fortune. 'He is a deep thinker. He reminded me of myself in my younger years as he sometimes seemed to have gotten completely lost in his thoughts and looked like he was unaware of his surroundings.' In 1995, Tulchinsky left to team up with another future billionaire: Israel Englander, a young hedge fund trader who had founded Millennium Management six years earlier with $35 million in investor assets. As Millennium grew, Tulchinsky developed a reputation within the firm for engineering successful statistical arbitrage trades. By the early 2000s, Tulchinsky and Englander were discussing the former founding his own shop within the Millennium mothership. 'As one of the pioneers of quantitative investing, Igor helped define what is possible. He has always been a step ahead,' said Englander, who seldom speaks with the press, in a written statement shared with Forbes. 'It has been extraordinary to see what he has achieved.' Yet, WorldQuant got off to the worst possible start. In August 2007, seven months after launching, there was a widespread meltdown across quant-driven investment funds after one trader's liquidation triggered a cascade of other liquidations in what became an early tremor in the emerging financial earthquake. WorldQuant suffered but Tulchinsky says he took all of the firm's money out of the market before it bottomed out, evading the worst. 'Cutting losses is a key principle that we follow, that's the essence of risk management' he says. 'In life people don't cut losses enough because it's emotional, it's unpleasant, but it's a very good strategy.' As assets rebounded and eventually grew, so did the embrace of global talent. WorldQuant opened its first international office in China shortly after launching when Tulchinsky tapped a Chinese friend of his to interview 1,000 candidates, and ultimately hired five of them. 'They were just spectacular alpha makers,' he recalls. The firm now has 1,000 employees working in outposts across 27 cities in 16 countries including other major financial centers, like London and Tokyo, but also in less typical locales, such as Armenia, Hungary and Vietnam. 'We are providing opportunity to the talent, and the talent is providing us with alphas,' explains Tulchinsky, who spends a significant amount of his time traveling to WorldQuant's various outposts. 'I'm so used to traveling, I get jet-lagged when I don't travel.' Outside of work, Tulchinsky also keeps busy. Between 2013 and 2023, he dropped $65 million into his charitable foundation, which primarily supports the firm's hallmark philanthropic initiative, WorldQuant University, an accredited and tuition-free online university that he founded in 2014, which offers free masters of science degrees in financial engineering and other STEM coursework. He has also invested in over 100 startups including robot maker Figure AI and financial startup EquityZen through his venture firm WorldQuant Ventures. In his spare time, he has published three books about investing and is working on a fourth about cutting losses. Tulchinsky has plenty more to say but Forbes' time with him is up. The billionaire has calls to take and then an afternoon flight to Miami to visit WorldQuant employees there. He clearly doesn't like sitting still: outside his office his firm's credo 'Change Is Progress' flashes from a 3-dimensional wall structure. 'The interesting thing about Belarus,' notes Tulchinsky with astonishment, 'I looked at it through Google Earth the other day—nothing's changed in 50 years.' And with that, he gets up and leaves.
