George Soros exits shares bought during Bill Hwang's Archegos implosion

George Soros’s investment firm, which snapped up shares sold off in massive blocks during the collapse of Bill Hwang’s Archegos Capital Management, exited the positions.

Soros Fund Management sold $194.3 million of ViacomCBS Inc., $77 million of Baidu Inc. shares and $46.4 million of stock in Vipshop Holdings Ltd., according to a regulatory filing released Friday. The billionaire’s firm also liquidated positions in Tencent Music Entertainment Group and Discovery Inc.

The sales are nearly identical in size to the purchases Soros’s investment firm disclosed at the end of the first quarter. Archegos, the family office of former hedge fund manager Hwang, fell apart during the last week of March after amassing large leveraged positions in a concentrated portfolio of U.S. and Chinese companies.

Most of the Archegos-linked stocks extended their slide in the second quarter. Vipshop plunged 33% in the three months through June, Tencent Music tumbled about 24%, Discovery dropped about 21% and Baidu fell 6.3%. ViacomCBS was little changed.

Soros’s investment firm didn’t hold these companies’ shares prior to Archegos’s implosion, a person familiar with the matter told Bloomberg News in May. Chief Investment Officer Dawn Fitzpatrick has said she’s willing to jump on dislocations in the market and “not just double down but triple down when the facts and circumstances support that.”

At its peak, Hwang’s family office had more than $20 billion of capital and total bets exceeding $120 billion. The portfolio collapsed in a matter of days after its investments tumbled, triggering margin calls from banks, which then sold the stocks in big block trades. Hedge funds and other investment firms swooped in to buy chunks, but the trades haven’t necessarily worked out.

The 13F, which money managers overseeing more than $100 million in U.S. equities must file quarterly, doesn’t disclose when a firm bought or sold shares or at what price. It revealed that Soros held $5.3 billion of U.S. equities, up almost $600 million from the prior quarter.

Soros’s firm increased its bet on Amazon.com Inc., as it did in the first quarter, and revealed new positions in IHS Markit Ltd. and Proterra Inc.

A spokesman for Soros declined to comment.