Look Who’s Been Buying Valeant

This is more of a matter of gawking at the sheer ferocity of the market than mocking fund managers for making really bad investments. The events that have transpired in VRX over the past 3 months, with shares dropping 70%, is nothing short of spectacular fuckery on a grandiose scale.

Andreas Halvorsen’s Viking Global Investors, long a top performing fund, bought 376,615 Valeant shares sometime between July and the end of September to own 4.9 million shares at the end of the quarter, according to a filing made on Monday.

Brahman Capital raised its stake by 958,300 shares to own roughly 4 million shares while Hound Capital bought an additional 1.2 million shares, making Valeant the fund’s biggest position with nearly 4 million shares, the filings show.

Marble Arch, Blue Mountain, Farallon and Adage also spent more money on Valeant during the summer months after Valeant became one of the market’s best performers during the first half of the year, notching gains on an aggressive acquisition strategy.

The notable fund missing from this pastiche, of course, is William Albert Ackman’s Pershing Capital. He made sure to buy more, upping his stake to 21 million shares–because 19 million simply wasn’t enough.