Follow the Smart Money: what separated the best and worst famous investor this year.
Five of the most recognisable investors alive have now reported what they owned. Ranked on what those disclosed American books actually returned this year, fifty-eight points separate the first from the last.
Steve Cohen's Point72 is up 56.7 percent. Bill Ackman's Pershing Square is down 1.6 percent. Same market, same year, same eight months.
That is the whole thing in two sentences. The detail is worth the read, because the obvious explanation for the gap is wrong, and almost everyone will reach for it anyway.
FIRST, THE TABLE
Point72 leads the year at 56.7 percent, on a book of 91 billion dollars spread across 2,452 positions. Coatue is second at 51.3 percent on 49 billion and 66 positions. Bridgewater is third at 43.1 percent, Berkshire fourth at 19.8 percent, and Pershing Square last at minus 1.6 percent.
THE HANDOVER AT THE TOP
The year to date column hides something. Over a full twelve months Coatue is the best of the five at 128.2 percent, a hair ahead of Point72 at 127.9. Year to date the order flips. Point72 has climbed a place and Coatue has slipped one, and that turn happened inside these eight months.
The most recent month belongs to neither of them. Bridgewater is up 16.0 percent over thirty days, the best of the five, against Cohen's 13.6 and Laffont's 12.4. Ray Dalio's book is third for the year and first right now.
Warren Buffett is the only one of the five going backwards. Berkshire is up 19.8 percent for the year and down 3.0 percent over the last month.
WHAT IT IS NOT
The tempting explanation is concentration. Hold fewer names, take bigger swings, win bigger. The data refuses it flatly.
Point72 holds 2,452 positions. Coatue holds 66. They are thirty-seven times apart on breadth and five points apart on return, first and second. Ackman holds eleven, the most concentrated book here by a distance, and he finished last. Buffett holds 29 and finished fourth. Line the five up by position count and the ranking is noise.
WHAT IT IS
Look at what they own instead. Coatue is the cleanest expression of the year: TSMC, Lam Research, Micron, Applied Materials. Semiconductors and the machines that make them, with no index fund anywhere in the top five. Bridgewater holds Nvidia and Broadcom. Point72's named holdings run to ASML and AMD.
Three different strategies, one bet underneath all of them.
THE PART THAT SHOULD MAKE YOU PAUSE
Two of the three leaders are not purely stock pickers. SPY sits inside Point72's top five holdings. Both SPY and IVV sit inside Bridgewater's. Some of what reads as brilliant selection is simply owning the index while the index ran, and any honest ranking has to say so.
Ackman is the mirror image. Brookfield, Amazon, Uber, Microsoft, Restaurant Brands. Good businesses, bought deliberately, held with conviction, and not one semiconductor among them. In a year decided by chips, that is the entire explanation for minus 1.6 percent.
WHAT THIS IS NOT EVIDENCE OF
One caveat we will not bury. Pershing Square's number rests on a first quarter filing while the other four are on the second. Ackman's book is a quarter stale and may look different when it lands.
And a 13F shows long American stock only. No shorts, no options, no foreign holdings, no cash. These are book returns chained from each fund's own filings, not the funds' reported performance, and the two are not the same thing. Eight months is a chip cycle. It is not a verdict on anybody's career.