(Bloomberg) — Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund invested heavily in one of the stocks tied to the Archegos Capital Management blowup, while maintaining its biggest holdings of other U.S.-listed equities last quarter.
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The Public Investment Fund owned $110.8 million in Farfetch Ltd. shares at the end of December, representing a 1% stake in the London-based luxury online retail platform after boosting its holding by nearly 1,000%, according to regulatory filings on Monday.
Farfetch’s stock was involved in a spree of block trades after Archegos failed to meet margin calls last March. Philippe Laffont’s investment firm Coatue Management was among firms that capitalized on the distressed remains of Bill Hwang’s hedge fund by taking a $148 million stake in Farfetch, which it exited in the second quarter last year.
Following the forced liquidation of positions linked to Archegos, Farfetch’s stock tumbled and is now down 74% from a record high reached a year ago. The shares are still trading above their lows reached in 2020. Analysts’ price targets forecast a 125% return potential for the stock over the next 12 months, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
The PIF, as the Saudi fund is known, also bought additional shares in Visa Inc., Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Pinterest Inc., while sharply cutting its stakes in BeiGene and Prologis Inc. Its total disclosed holdings of U.S.-listed stocks reached $56 billion.
Chaired by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the wealth fund closed a year that saw it more than quadruple its exposure to U.S. equities after taking an increasingly prominent role in global markets. It may invest about $10 billion more into listed stocks this year, according to people familiar with the matter, as it pursues the goal of bringing holdings to over 4 trillion riyals ($1.1 trillion) by 2025.
The PIF has about $580 billion in assets after the Saudi government this month handed it a 4% stake in Aramco, the world’s largest oil exporter, adding to a $40 billion transfer from the kingdom’s reserves in early 2020 when the pandemic sent equities into a tailspin.
Its other top U.S. shareholdings, including stakes in Lucid Group Inc. and Uber Technologies Inc., were unchanged in the fourth quarter. The wealth fund’s disclosed holdings rose 29% in value during the period.
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