Bridgewater Associates, the world's largest hedge fund, released its third-quarter holdings report as of September 30, 2024. The total market value of its stock holdings decreased by approximately 7.8% to $17.7 billion compared to the previous quarter's $19.2 billion. During the third quarter, Bridgewater took new positions in 79 securities, increased holdings in 260, fully exited 183, and reduced its stake in 428.
The portfolio is diversified, with the top ten holdings accounting for only 32.29% of the total market value. The top five holdings include iShares Core S&P 500 ETF (IVV), iShares Core MSCI Emerging Markets ETF (IEMG), Alphabet (GOOGL), Nvidia (NVDA), and SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (SPY).
Notably, Bridgewater significantly reduced its holdings in technology stocks this quarter. Major reductions were seen in Nvidia (NVDA), Meta (META), Microsoft (MSFT), and Amazon (AMZN) with declines of 27.48%, 16.65%, 20.19%, and 46.64% respectively. Additionally, the firm completely exited positions in Oracle (ORCL) and IBM (IBM).
Conversely, Bridgewater increased its stake in Apple (AAPL, Financial) by purchasing an additional 562,000 shares, marking a 119.86% increase. Apple became its tenth largest holding, with a market value of $240 million by the end of the third quarter, increasing its portfolio weight from 0.52% to 1.36%.
This is noteworthy as in the previous quarter, Bridgewater had significantly reduced its Apple holdings by more than 70% down to 469,000 shares. Apple's stock performance this year has been a decline of 10.88% in the first quarter, followed by an increase of 23.11% and 10.78% in the second and third quarters respectively.
Bridgewater also made a significant move by increasing its stake in Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). After AMD's stock price dropped 18.88% and 49.18% in the second and third quarters, Bridgewater substantially increased its holdings by 1.45 million shares, a 921.13% boost. Despite this, AMD's stock continued to fall, dropping 56.75% in the fourth quarter amid accounting fraud and delisting concerns.
Another major reduction was seen in Procter & Gamble (PG), where Bridgewater reduced its holdings by 1.99 million shares, a 55.46% decrease, lowering its portfolio weight from 3.10% to 1.57%.
In Chinese stocks, Pinduoduo (PDD) ranked as Bridgewater's 17th largest holding. A slight decrease of 3,006 shares in the third quarter left its market value at $168 million, with its portfolio weight slightly increasing from 0.87% to 0.96%.
