YouTube / Saïd Business School, University of Oxford
- Bill Ackman's Pershing Square has probably made over $200 million on Domino's Pizza stock.
- The investor's fund owned $749 million of the pizza-delivery group's shares at the end of March.
- Domino's stock has surged 31% since then, lifting Pershing's stake to about $980 million.
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Billionaire investor Bill Ackman has likely made over $200 million on Domino's Pizza stock in the past 14 weeks.
Ackman's fund, Pershing Square Capital Management, owned just over 2 million Domino's shares worth $749 million on March 30, regulatory filings show. The pizza-delivery chain's stock price has surged by 31% since then, boosting the value of Pershing's stake to about $980 million – a roughly $230 million gain.
Pershing sold its almost 1% stake in Starbucks – worth $1.1 billion at the end of December – to fund the Domino's investment. Ackman and his team started buying the pizza company's shares after they slumped in early March, he revealed at a Wall Street Journal event in May.
"We've admired it for years, and it was just never cheap enough," Ackman said. "Then for about five minutes, it got cheap. I don't know who sold or why, but we started buying around $330 a share, and then it very quickly moved up a lot."
Domino's fits well in Pershing's portfolio. The firm counted $1.5 billion stakes in both Chipotle and Burger King-parent Restaurant Brands among its seven holdings at the end of March, and Ackman's previous bets in the space have paid off.
"We've never lost money investing in a restaurant company," he told The Journal. "I think we've never not made a lot of money."
Ackman added he likes Domino's because it delivers its own pizzas and doesn't have to give a cut of each order to DoorDash or other third-party platforms. That allows the company to keep its prices low and fend off competition, he said.