Viking Global builds on Amazon position, dumps FedEx and Tesla in active first quarter
Hedge fund Viking Global shuffled some of its largest holdings during a busy first quarter, including ditching some big-name stocks. The fund, run by Andreas Halvorsen, had roughly $47 billion in assets under management at the end of December, according to its website. Its equity exposure fell by nearly $10 billion during the first quarter, according to a securities filing, but it is unknown how much of that drop was attributable to market losses versus selling stocks to shift to other asset classes. Two big increases among major holdings came in Amazon and industrial tech company Fortive , rising roughly 52% and 42%, respectively. The moves made Amazon the fund's second largest holding at the end of March, trailing only T-Mobile. One big move just outside of the fund's top 10 holdings was International Flavors & Fragrances . Viking ended March with nearly 3.8 million shares of the stock, valued at just under $500 million. That is up from about 510,000 shares at the end of December. Viking also initiated several positions that were worth more than $100 million at the end of March, including Otis , Progressive , Shopify and XP . On the other hand, the list of major positions closed by Viking include Tesla , Twilio , Coupa Software , FedEx and Figs . Twilio and Coupa were the largest of those positions at the end of December, totaling more than $1.4 million in common stock combined. There are no obvious macro or sector calls from Viking's moves, as the trades appear to be more about picking individual winners. For example, the fund established a new position Mastercard worth more than $640 million but also sold more than one-third of its position in Visa . Viking swapped out positions in many of its health-care stocks, such as closing a position in Zimmer Biomet while more than doubling its shares of Thermo Fisher Scientific . There were several new positions for Viking in large name companies that came in under $100 million. Those buys include Boeing , JPMorgan Chase , Anthem and Dollar General . Viking Global was founded by Halvorsen, one of legendary hedge fund manager Julian Robertson's "Tiger cubs," more than two decades ago.