Although emotions can come into play when investing, Wall Street is primarily a data-driven landscape. Quarterly operating results and near-daily (Monday through Friday) economic data releases give investors plenty to comb over.
But perhaps the most important data reveal of each quarter is Form 13F filings from America's most-prominent billionaire money managers.
A 13F provides investors with a concise snapshot of which stocks Wall Street's leading asset managers -- those with at least $100 million in assets under management (AUM) -- have been buying, selling, and holding. Even though these snapshots are up to 45 days old when filed, they can still provide valuable insight into which stocks, industries, sectors, and trends the smartest money managers are flocking to.
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What's been particularly noteworthy about quarterly 13F filings is seeing how the stock market's most-successful billionaire investors have approached Wall Street's artificial intelligence (AI) darling Nvidia (NVDA +0.10%). Whereas focused billionaire fund managers -- by "focused," I mean a fund with 100 or fewer securities -- have been persistently paring down or completely jettisoning Nvidia stock, one well-known billionaire hasn't sold a single share.
Is this billionaire Nvidia's biggest bull?
There are more than one dozen billionaire money managers who oversee a concentrated portfolio ranging from 10 to 100 securities. Among these, four have been persistent sellers of Nvidia stock:
- Philippe Laffont of Coatue Management: Sold 39,795,532 shares of Nvidia since the first quarter of 2023.
- David Tepper of Appaloosa Management: Sold 9,569,999 shares since the third quarter of 2023.
- Stephen Mandel of Lone Pine Capital: Sold his fund's entire stake of 6,416,490 shares since the second quarter of 2023.
- Stanley Druckenmiller of Duquesne Family Office: Sold his fund's entire stake of 9,500,750 shares since the second quarter of 2023.
Note, these share counts have been adjusted for Nvidia's historic 10-for-1 forward stock split undertaken in June 2024.
On the other end of the spectrum is the one billionaire fund manager who hasn't cashed in a single share: Chase Coleman of Tiger Global Management.
NASDAQ: NVDA
Key Data Points
As of the end of 2024, Coleman was overseeing close to $26.5 billion in AUM, which was spread across 49 stocks. Tiger's billionaire chief is a big believer in innovation-driven tech stocks, the AI revolution, and Nvidia. Throughout 2024, Coleman held firm to the 9,683,550 split-adjusted shares of Nvidia in Tiger Global's portfolio.
The only other focused billionaire who's been a buyer is Viking Global Investors' Ole Andreas Halvorsen, who opened a 2,031,985-share position last year. Coleman's stake in nearly five times the size of Halvorsen's.
The likely reason Coleman remains steadfastly optimistic about Nvidia's future is its utter dominance of graphics processing unit (GPU) market share in high-compute data centers. The company's Hopper (H100) and successor Blackwell GPU architecture are dominating in AI data centers, with extensive backlogs and superior pricing power allowing Nvidia to consistently blow past Wall Street's consensus expectations.
The scarcity of high-powered AI-GPUs has also worked in Nvidia's favor. Even with world-leading chip fabrication company Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing rapidly ramping up its chip-on-wafer-on-substrate capacity, which is necessary for the packaging of high-bandwidth memory in AI-accelerated data centers, Nvidia and its competitors can't sell AI-GPUs fast enough. Having the fastest and most in-demand hardware has allowed Nvidia to charge between a 100% to 300% per-unit premium to its peers.
Chase Coleman's love for innovation is likely playing a role in his desire to hang onto his fund's entire 9.68-million-share Nvidia stake, as well. The newly introduced Blackwell GPU is considerably more energy efficient than its predecessor, but it's designed to notably speed up computation for generative AI and quantum computing.
Thus far, Coleman's optimism and unwillingness to sell a single share have paid off, big-time!
Image source: Getty Images.
Most billionaires are wary of Nvidia stock
But there are two sides to every coin, and the vast majority of billionaire money managers have been net sellers of Nvidia stock. Despite the company's well-defined competitive advantages and the superior computing speed of its Hopper and Blackwell GPUs, billionaires Philippe Laffont, David Tepper, Stephen Mandel, and Stanley Druckenmiller have likely homed in on a few glaring flaws.
Arguably the most obvious is the expectation that competition will pick up and continually strip away Nvidia's monopoly like market share in enterprise AI-data centers. While the focus tends to be on the direct competitors that are producing AI-GPUs of their own (e.g., Advanced Micro Devices), the bigger worry might come from Nvidia's own top customers.
Over the last two years, Wall Street's AI darling has secured some mammoth orders from most members of the "Magnificent Seven." But many of these top customers by net sales are developing AI chips of their own that can assist with generative AI solutions and the training of large language models. Even though these internally developed solutions may not be as fast as Nvidia's hardware, they're bound to be substantially cheaper and more readily available. It's a recipe for Nvidia to lose out on valuable data center real estate beyond 2025.
This billionaire quartet might also have reservations about a possible AI bubble forming. For more than 30 years, every game-changing technology/innovation, including the internet, has endured a bubble-bursting event. This is a reflection of investors consistently overestimating how quickly a new technology will be adopted on a mainstream basis and gain utility. It leads to lofty expectations that are, eventually, not met, and the bursting of a bubble.
No stock has benefited more directly from the rise of AI than Nvidia, with more than 88% of its net sales deriving from its data center segment in fiscal 2025 (ended Jan. 26, 2025). If an AI bubble were to form and burst, it's logical to expect Nvidia stock to take it on the chin.
At best, Nvidia has a long way to go before it grows into its current valuation following its parabolic move higher. At worst, shareholders could be facing an elevator-like move lower.
