Altimeter’s Brad Gerstner says he trimmed positions across portfolio

Altimeter Capital Chair and CEO Brad Gerstner said he has taken some chips off the table after this year’s strong run in technology stocks, but he is still bullish on the names that are reaccelerating because of artificial intelligence. “All of these stocks are up a lot just to start this year and the backdrop has gotten a little worse,” Gerstner said on CNBC’s ” Halftime Report ” on Tuesday. “If you want to take a little bit off the table today, just reflecting on the fact that you’ve achieved a year’s worth of returns in the first few months of the year, I think that makes sense.” The widely followed investor revealed that he has taken down his own exposure by 10 percentage points to 20 percentage points in his hedge fund and the long-only fund by both adding shorts and reducing some of the overall position sizes. “People think that they’re always 100% invested. That’s not the case when the market is up this much to start the year when the backdrop is this volatile. I think it makes sense to trim a little and so that’s what we’ve done across our portfolios,” he said. At the end of 2023, Altimeter’s top five holdings were Snowflake , Meta , Uber, Microsoft and Nvidia . Meta has climbed more than 32% in 2024, while Nvidia is up another 84% this year. Billionaire investor Stanley Druckenmiller also said he slashed his big bet in chipmaker Nvidia earlier this year, adding that the swift AI boom could be overhyped in the short run. Gerstner noted that the macro environment has turned less ideal for investors. First, the Federal Reserve is now expected to continue to hold off on cutting rates to fight stubborn inflation. Also, corporate tax rates might go up as the reduction from 2017 is set to expire, Gerstner said. “We started the year expecting six rate cuts. Now we’re down to maybe zero rate cuts,” he said. “We’ve got an election coming up and the potential that the corporate tax rate cuts from 2017 … will expire at the end of 2025 unless extended, and those represent a meaningful part of the growth in the S & P 500.” While trimming his positions this year, Gerstner, a Harvard Business School graduate, clarified that he wants to invest in some of his top holdings in the long run. “We want to be in the names like Nvidia that are reaccelerating, in the names like Amazon and Google and Microsoft and Snowflake that we believe are reaccelerating. It’s only with that reacceleration … the numbers are going up for those companies, that the stocks are going to work,” he said.