Three of the most-followed names in investing all made the same bet last quarter. They bought chip stocks. The Iran war was on. Oil was jumping. They bought chips anyway, and the bets are paying off in a big way.
A new round of 13F filings reviewed by CNBC shows billionaire family offices ran hard at chipmakers in Q1. The rest of the market was busy worrying about oil.
David Tepper runs Appaloosa Management. He also owns the Carolina Panthers. Last quarter, he raised his Micron stake 11% to $562.5 million. That made Micron his second-biggest holding. He bumped his Taiwan Semi stake 18% to $448.6 million. He also opened a fresh $179 million spot in Sandisk.
Stanley Druckenmiller's Duquesne made the same Sandisk bet, with a new $24 million position. Then he added $161 million more in Broadcom.
George Soros went the same way on Nvidia. His firm raised its position 61% to $187 million. That moved Nvidia into the firm's top 10.
The timing looks really good. Sandisk and Micron shares jumped about 50% and 60% in the past month. Broadcom is up around 35% since the end of March. Taiwan Semi and Nvidia are up about 19% and 28% in that span.
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The same investors did not agree on energy. Each office picked a different lane.
Tepper more than doubled his Vistra Corp stake to $304 million. Vistra is a Texas power firm. Michael Platt's BlueCrest went the other way and dumped its $103 million Vistra position.
Druckenmiller cut his Bloom Energy stake 82% to $89 million. At the same time, he raised his bet on YPF Sociedad by more than 5x to $150 million. YPF is an oil and gas firm in Argentina. The move makes Duquesne YPF's fifth-largest institutional holder.
That split tracks a broader pattern. Some family offices won big on oil bets made before the Iran war. The smartest money is being more picky about where it goes from here.
One trade lined up across these family offices. They all got out of airlines.
Appaloosa sold its stakes in American, Delta, and United. Duquesne also exited Delta. The reason is simple. Jet fuel costs spiked because of the Iran war. Airlines pay more for fuel than anything but labor.
That math gets ugly fast.
The chip trade was the contrarian call. Everyone else was worried about oil. The smartest investors bought chipmakers and watched the numbers fly.
Now the question is whether the rally has more room to run. Memory chips like the ones Micron and Sandisk make have been in tight supply. AI data centers keep buying them up. As long as that demand holds, the chip names these family offices loaded up on still have a tailwind.
The next round of 13F filings drops in August. That will show if the big names doubled down or took profits.
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