Stanley Druckenmiller – The man behind George Soros’ famous British Pound short
Stanley Druckenmiller, a legend on Wall Street, has achieved a higher annual return than billionaire and Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett.
Druckenmiller achieved a compound annual return of over 30% for almost 30 years, significantly better than Berkshire Hathaway’s 20.1%.
He founded the hedge fund Duquesne Capital Management in 1981 and teamed up with George Soros’ Quantum fund in 1998.
He tripled the fund’s value by 1992, surpassing the performance of Soros.
Druckenmiller was also responsible for coming up with the play to short the British Pound, which made Soros a lot of money.
He correctly predicted that Britain would break the European Union’s exchange rate mechanism to unify their currencies into the Euro.
In 2000, Druckenmiller resigned from Quantum fund after losing $3 billion on the tech bubble’s collapse and went back to managing only Duquesne Capital Management.
In 2010, Druckenmiller converted Duquesne Capital Management into a family office.
Druckenmiller holds a bearish view of the current market.
In May 2021, he criticized Fed policy, calling it “totally inappropriate” because they maintained emergency stimulus measures even after the US economy recovered.
During CNBC’s Delivering Alpha Investor Summit last month, Druckenmiller said, “I will be stunned if we don’t have a recession in 2023”.
“I will not be surprised if it’s not larger than the average garden variety. I don’t rule out something really bad,” he said.
Earlier in September, he said there’s a high probability that the market, at best, is going to be kind of flat for ten years, sort of like the ’66 to ’82 time period.
In the second quarter of 2022, Duquesne sold all its Amazon shares. The firm also sold holdings in British American Tobacco, Snapchat, Netflix, Sea, and Mosaic and trimmed its Microsoft holding.
Duquesne only made four purchases, the biggest of which are Antero Resources and Palantir Technologies.
Below is a summary of Duquesne Family Office’s remaining stock holdings at the end of June 2022.
| Name | Value ($ million) | Portfolio Weight |
| Coupang | $248 | 17.9% |
| Microsoft | $190 | 13.8% |
| Chevron | $120 | 8.7% |
| Lilly Eli | $96 | 7.0% |
| Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold | $95 | 6.8% |
| T-Mobile | $91 | 6.6% |
| KBR Inc | $63 | 4.6% |
| Willscot Corp | $57 | 4.1% |
| Crowdstrike | $39 | 2.8% |
| Palantir | $39 | 2.8% |
| Coterra Energy | $36 | 2.6% |
| Teck Resources | $32 | 2.3% |
| Antero Resources | $31 | 2.3% |
| Moderna | $30 | 2.1% |
| Datadog | $28 | 2.1% |
| Palo Alto Networks | $25 | 1.8% |
| Cenovus Energy | $20 | 1.5% |
| Edison International | $18 | 1.3% |
| Westlake Chemical Corp | $14 | 1.0% |
| Booking Holdings Inc | $14 | 1.0% |
| Workday Inc | $12 | 0.8% |
| Pioneer Natural Resources | $11 | 0.8% |
| Phillips 66 | $10 | 0.7% |
| EQT Corporation | $9 | 0.6% |
| Las Vegas Sands Corp (Call Option) | $8 | 0.6% |
| Abcellera Biologics | $7 | 0.5% |
| IHS Holding | $6 | 0.5% |
| Smartsheet Inc | $5 | 0.3% |
| Samsara | $4 | 0.3% |
| Oscar Health | $4 | 0.3% |
| SolarEdge Technologies | $4 | 0.3% |
| CCC Intelligent Solutions | $3 | 0.2% |
| Recursion Pharmaceuticals | $2 | 0.2% |
| Dish Network Corp | $2 | 0.1% |
| Reata Pharmaceuticals | $2 | 0.1% |
| Caribou Biosciences | $1 | 0.1% |
| Compass Inc | $1 | 0.1% |
| Procept BioRobotics Corp | $1 | 0.1% |
| Opendoor Technologies | $1 | 0.1% |
| Acadia Pharmaceuticals | $1 | 0.1% |
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