One of the world’s largest charities has made significant changes in its investment portfolio.
Wellcome Trust sold all of its shares of
Meta Platforms
(ticker: META), and trimmed investments in
Apple
(AAPL) and
Microsoft
stock (MSFT) in the first quarter.
The London-based health foundation disclosed the stock trades, among others, in a form it filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. It declined to comment on the transactions.
Wellcome manages about $47 billion in assets, and is the largest U.K. charity. The trust showed some investment savvy in its latest fiscal year ended Sept. 30, 2022, when its portfolio returned 1.7%. The
S&P 500 index
dove 17% over the same period.
The trust exited its investment in Meta stock. At the end of 2022, it owned 1.3 million shares of Facebook’s parent; by March 31, it owned none.
Wellcome sold Meta stock while it was having quite a run. Shares rocketed 85% in the first quarter, compared with a 7% increase in the S&P 500. The stock was coming off a weak 2022, when shares tumbled 64%. The index slid 19%.
At the end of January, Meta announced a round of cost cuts and more stock buybacks, sending shares soaring. The announcement overshadowed a mixed fourth-quarter report. In March, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled the mantras “flatter is faster” and “leaner is better” in a note to employees. The old motto was “move fast and break things.”
Apple is another tech stock that rallied in the first quarter after a 2022 slump, though neither move was as drastic as Meta’s trajectory. Apple rose 27% in the first quarter, after a 27% slump in 2022.
Earlier this month, value investor
Warren Buffett
expressed his love of Apple stock and the fierce loyalty of its iPhone users. In the past week, Apple launched a high-yield savings account in conjunction with
Goldman Sachs Group
(GS), accessible through the phones. General Motors (GM), meanwhile, dropped Apple’s CarPlay app, which allows users to access iPhone functions though car displays.
Wellcome sold 200,000 Apple shares to trim its investment to 3.1 million shares.
The trust sold 150,000 Microsoft shares to end March with 2.3 million shares. The tech giant’s stock logged a 20% rise in the first quarter, after a 29% drop in 2022.
In February, Microsoft said it was adding artificial-intelligence chatbot ChatGPT to its Bing search engine in a bid to disrupt
Alphabet
(GOOGL) unit Google’s 90% market share. We’ve noted that AI products such as ChatGPT “can’t match human intelligence in terms of accuracy, creativity, or originality.” Nonetheless, J.P. Morgan noted in April that “generative AI is likely to be one of the defining technological developments of our generation,” and that Microsoft is a “clear early leader” in the field.
Inside Scoop is a regular Barron’s feature covering stock transactions by corporate executives and board members—so-called insiders—as well as large shareholders, politicians, and other prominent figures. Due to their insider status, these investors are required to disclose stock trades with the Securities and Exchange Commission or other regulatory groups.
Write to Ed Lin at edward.lin@barrons.com and follow @BarronsEdLin.
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