Bill Ackman's Pershing Square: ten stocks, large bets and constant rotation
Pershing Square holds about ten large companies. Five quarters show a switch from Alphabet to Amazon, Meta and Microsoft, and what concentrated investing really looks like.
Who he is and why people copy him
Bill Ackman founded Pershing Square in 2004. He is known for public campaigns, large bets on a handful of companies and a willingness to explain his reasoning in long presentations that anyone can read. His funds had a spectacular 2020, when he bought protection against a market collapse before the pandemic and turned it into a large profit, and some difficult years before that, notably with Valeant.
Because the portfolio is so concentrated and he explains his reasoning in public, each quarterly filing is easy to read. That makes Pershing Square one of the clearest examples of what a concentrated book looks like through time.
The ideas behind the portfolio
Ackman describes his approach as buying a small number of simple, predictable businesses that generate a lot of cash and are protected by strong barriers to entry, at a price below their value, and then holding them for a long time. He has often said he looks for companies where the quality of the business is clear and the price is the question. Historically he also took an active role, pushing management or the board to change course, as at Canadian Pacific, and he keeps the right to do so.
The philosophy descends directly from Buffett, but Ackman takes it further in two ways: a smaller number of positions, usually eight to twelve, and a readiness to act as an owner rather than a passenger. The risk of the same idea is also clear: if one bet in a ten-stock book goes wrong, it matters.
What a Form 13F does and does not show
The filing lists the US-listed stocks and funds held on the last day of the quarter. Pershing Square's book is easy to read because it holds almost nothing else in that format, but there are limits: derivatives that protect against a market fall, credit hedges and positions held in other forms are not in the list, and what a fund holds may differ from what the firm managing it reports. The report is also up to 45 days old when published.
For the quarter ending June 2026 the firm filed a notice (a Form 13F-NT) instead of a holdings report, so our data for this portfolio stops at the end of March 2026.
The portfolio over the last five quarters
From March 2025 to March 2026 the reported portfolio went from $11.9 billion to $13.7 billion. Ten names make up all of it, and the largest four hold between 15% and 18% each at the end: Brookfield (17.6%), Amazon (17.4%), Uber (15.7%) and Microsoft (15.3%), followed by Restaurant Brands (12.2%), Meta Platforms (11.1%) and Howard Hughes (8.7%).
A year earlier the picture was different. In March 2025 the biggest positions were Uber (18.5%), Brookfield (18.0%), Alphabet (14.0%) and Restaurant Brands (12.8%), with Howard Hughes (11.7%), Chipotle (9.1%), Canadian Pacific Kansas City (8.7%) and Hilton (5.7%) behind them. Three of the four anchors of the old portfolio (Brookfield, Uber, Restaurant Brands) stayed and kept roughly their weights. A large part of the rest of the book was replaced.
Ten largest positions at the end of the latest quarter (2026-03-31) and the same names at the start of the period (2025-03-31), as a share of the US-listed stocks in the report (10 positions, $13.7 billion in total).
| Position | 2026-03-31 | 2025-03-31 |
|---|---|---|
| Brookfield | 17.6% | 18.0% |
| Amazon | 17.4% | — |
| Uber Technologies | 15.7% | 18.5% |
| Microsoft | 15.3% | — |
| Restaurant Brands | 12.2% | 12.8% |
| Meta Platforms | 11.1% | — |
| Howard Hughes | 8.7% | 11.7% |
| Seaport Entertainment | 0.8% | 0.9% |
| Alphabet | 0.7% | 14.0% |
| Hertz Global | 0.5% | 0.5% |
| Ten largest together | 100.0% | 100.0% |
What changed quarter by quarter
In the quarter to June 2025 Pershing Square closed Canadian Pacific Kansas City, 8.7% of the portfolio, a company Ackman had owned for over a decade, and opened Amazon at 9.3%. In the quarter to September nothing was opened or closed, but Alphabet grew as a share of the book and Chipotle shrank. In the quarter to December Chipotle (5.8%) was closed, Meta Platforms was opened as a new 11.4% position, and Amazon grew by 5.6 percentage points.
The sharpest move came in the quarter to March 2026: Microsoft was opened as a new 15.3% position and Hilton (5.6%) was closed, while Alphabet, which had been 13.8% of the book at the end of December, was cut by about 95% of its shares to a token 0.7%. In under a year the book moved out of Alphabet and into three other large technology platforms: Amazon, Meta and Microsoft.
Changes between consecutive filings. A share is measured as a part of the reported stock portfolio; it can move because of price changes too, so read it together with the text.
| Quarter end | Positions | Opened | Closed | Biggest rise in share | Biggest fall in share |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2025-06-30 | 10 → 10 | Amazon (9.3%) | Canadian Pacific Kansas City (8.7%) | Uber Technologies (+2.1 pp) | Howard Hughes (−2.4 pp) |
| 2025-09-30 | 10 → 10 | — | — | Alphabet (+3.5 pp) | Chipotle Mexican Grill (−3.0 pp) |
| 2025-12-31 | 10 → 10 | Meta Platforms (11.4%) | Chipotle Mexican Grill (5.8%) | Amazon (+5.6 pp) | Alphabet (−4.7 pp) |
| 2026-03-31 | 10 → 10 | Microsoft (15.3%) | Hilton (5.6%) | Amazon (+3.1 pp) | Alphabet (−13.1 pp) |
What to take away, and what to doubt
The lesson is that a concentrated portfolio does not mean a static one. Ackman kept a stable core and replaced several positions in a year, each time with a large starting position of 9% to 15%. A ten-stock book also shows its price: any one decision moves the result, and the big weights in Amazon, Microsoft and Meta make the portfolio dependent on a single theme, large technology platforms.
The warnings are the same as for any filing. We see holdings but not hedges, we see them late, and a few years of performance do not prove a method. A fund with eight to twelve positions will always have years when it trails the market badly, and an investor who copies the list without the conviction and the capital to wait is likely to sell at the wrong time.
Where it meets our bots
No bot on this site picks a handful of stocks by judgement; our nearest relative is the bot that holds the ten strongest stocks of the year, which also runs a ten-stock book but chooses by recent price strength instead of business quality. The comparison is a good test of what conviction buys: both are concentrated, but one rests on a story about the business and the other on a rule.
Our reference bot, a fund of the 500 largest companies, shows what the same stocks would have done as part of the whole market. The guides below explain these rules.
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