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- The Mormon Church exited its GameStop position and cut its Tesla holdings last quarter.
- Ensign Peak Advisors disposed of its 46,000 GameStop shares, pocketing as much as $14 million.
- The church fund sold 13% of its Tesla shares, leaving a stake worth $382 million on June 30.
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The Mormon Church cashed out its GameStop profits and trimmed its Tesla stake in the second quarter, regulatory filings show.
Ensign Peak Advisors – the secretive $100 billion investing arm of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints – was a surprise winner from the GameStop short squeeze at the start of this year. The fund bought 46,000 shares of the video-game retailer in the fourth quarter of 2020, and saw its position skyrocket by about 900% to $8.7 million over the next three months as retail investors piled into the meme stock.
Ensign appears to have sold the entire holding last quarter, as the stock is absent from its latest filing. It likely raked in about $9 million from the disposal, based on GameStop’s average closing share price in the period, or as much as $14 million if it sold at the peak in June.
The church fund also pared its Tesla bet last quarter, cutting its stake in Elon Musk’s electric-vehicle company by 13% to 561,000 shares, worth $382 million at the end of June. Ensign grew its split-adjusted stake from about 2,500 shares to 648,000 shares during the year to March 30, but appears to have soured on the stock last quarter.
The total value of Ensign’s US stock portfolio swelled by about $3 billion to nearly $50 billion last quarter. Its top two holdings were roughly $2.3 billion stakes in both Microsoft and Apple, followed by positions worth over $1 billion in each of Alphabet, Amazon, and Facebook.