George Soros is one of the biggest investors, businessmen, and philanthropists. Soros currently has a net worth of $7.2 billion, as of October 4, according to Forbes. The legendary billionaire investor managed client money between 1969 and 2011. Soros made a fortune after shorting the British pound in 1992, making $1 billion. He has donated over $32 billion to his philanthropic organization, Open Society, of which almost $15 billion has been distributed. You can also read our piece on the best growth stocks to buy according to George Soros.
Soros is the author of multiple books including the very popular The Alchemy of Finance, Soros on Soros: Staying Ahead of the Curve, and The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The Credit Crisis of 2008 and What it Means. He last wrote a book in 2019 named In Defense of Open Society. The book is a collection of Soros’ writings on various topics including artificial intelligence, machine learning, political philanthropy, and financial markets.
Soros’ View on Artificial Intelligence
According to Soros, AI poses a threat to democracies especially with its extensive surveillance capabilities. He suggests that to distinguish between right and wrong humans must strike a balance between understanding reality and assessing how to change the world in our favor. Artificial intelligence destroys the very essence of reality, creating a disbalance. Soros emphasizes the need for AI to be regulated but for these regulations to work, societies from across the globe must work together. He also added that in an ideal world, standard regulations may have been possible but our countries our run on two distinct ideologies, the open and closed society. Here is what Soros stated:
“AI destroyed this simple schema because it has absolutely nothing to do with reality. AI creates its own reality and when that artificial reality fails to correspond to the real world –which happens quite often — it is discarded as hallucination. This made me almost instinctively opposed to AI and I wholeheartedly agree with the experts who argue that it needs to be regulated. But AI regulations have to be globally enforceable, because the incentive to cheat is too great; those who evade the regulations gain an unfair advantage.”
Adding to this, he suggests that while AI may make closed societies more powerful it may pose a threat to open societies. In addition to that, Soros suggested that repressive regimes like China and Russia are benefitting from the incidence of AI and thus are able to garner greater control over less powerful nations. His primary concern around AI and technology is surveillance and the misuse of data. Soros said the following about the future of AI:
“AI is developing incredibly fast, and it is impossible for ordinary human intelligence to fully understand it. Nobody can predict where it will take us. But we can be sure of one thing: AI helps closed societies and poses a mortal threat to open societies. That’s because AI is particularly good at producing instruments of control that help closed societies to surveil their subjects.”
A Deep Understanding of Soros’s Investment Philosophy
Soros founded the Soros Fund Management LLC, a private investment management firm in 1970. He is known for his contrarian investing philosophy and has made fortunes for himself and investors through his strategies. His hedge fund is based on the idea of making elaborate one-way bets on currency movements, commodity prices, stocks, bonds, and any assets driven by macroeconomic conditions.
Soros is known to have let macroeconomic conditions shape his investment decisions. This is a crucial aspect of his trading strategy referred to as reflexivity. This strategy defies standard economic conditions and emphasizes that market participants have the power to influence market fundamentals, and consequently the financial market. In light of his contrarian investment philosophy, Soros said the following in his book, Staying Ahead of the Curve:
“The prevailing wisdom is that markets are always right. I take the opposition position. I assume that markets are always wrong. Even if my assumption is occasionally wrong, I use it as a working hypothesis. It does not follow that one should always go against the prevailing trend. On the contrary, most of the time the trend prevails; only occasionally are the errors corrected. It is only on those occasions that one should go against the trend. This line of reasoning leads me to look for the flaw in every investment thesis. … I am ahead of the curve. I watch out for telltale signs that a trend may be exhausted. Then I disengage from the herd and look for a different investment thesis. Or, if I think the trend has been carried to excess, I may probe going against it. Most of the time we are punished if we go against the trend. Only at an inflection point are we rewarded.”
Now that we have studied one of Soros’s most important investment philosophies, let’s take a look at the top 10 holdings of George Soros.
George Soros of Soros Fund Management
Our Methodology
We sifted through Soros Fund Management’s Q2 2024 13F filings and picked the fund’s top 10 picks. The stocks are ranked in ascending order of the fund’s stakes in them. We have also mentioned the hedge fund sentiment around each stock.
Why are we interested in the stocks that hedge funds pile into? The reason is simple: our research has shown that we can outperform the market by imitating the top stock picks of the best hedge funds. Our quarterly newsletter’s strategy selects 14 small-cap and large-cap stocks every quarter and has returned 275% since May 2014, beating its benchmark by 150 percentage points (see more details here).
George Soros Net Worth and Top 10 Holdings in 2024
10. Accenture plc (NYSE:ACN)
Soros Fund Management’s Stake Value: $60.75 Million
Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 68
Accenture plc (NYSE:ACN) is one of George Soros’s top 10 holdings that makes up 1.1% of his portfolio. Soros increased his position in the stock by 105% in the second quarter of 2024. Accenture plc (NYSE:ACN) is a multinational professional services company that helps entities of all sizes optimize their operations and boost revenue growth.
The company is home to over 750,000 employees who provide services to over 9,000 clients in 120 countries from across the globe. The technology consulting company helps customers build their cloud, cybersecurity, AI, and enterprise capabilities.
The company recently purchased Excelmax Technologies from India, a semiconductor design services provider to expand its offerings and benefit from the AI wave. The acquisition added another 450 employees to the company in crucial departments including physical design, logic design, and verification. Later in July, Accenture plc (NYSE:ACN) acquired Camelot Management Consultants, a SAP-focused management and consulting firm in Germany, that specializes in supply chain, data, and analytics. In addition to that, in the first week of October, the company not only acquired a healthcare consultancy in Germany but also partnered with NVIDIA to help enterprises across the globe adopt AI faster.
Accenture’s (NYSE:ACN) competitive edge lies in its strong footing in the IT and consulting sector supported by its ability to buy out competition. This explains why 68 hedge funds were bullish on the stock at the end of Q2 2024 with total stakes amounting to $3.7 billion.
Polen Focus Growth Strategy stated the following regarding Accenture plc (NYSE:ACN) in its Q2 2024 investor letter:
“Autodesk and Accenture plc (NYSE:ACN) were also notable absolute detractors in the quarter. For Accenture, the past year has proven to be a weak backdrop for the IT services industry as enterprises rationalize their IT budgets and defer spending on discretionary, shorter-cycle deals. Accenture has not been immune to this broader weakness, as evidenced by slowing growth in recent quarters. However, we would note that later in the quarter, the stock responded very positively to results that showcased AI bookings growing rapidly, though still a small portion of overall bookings. Additionally, as we head into 2025, growth comparisons should ease considerably.”
9. Stericycle, Inc. (NASDAQ:SRCL)
Soros Fund Management’s Stake Value: $63.87 Million
Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 46
Stericycle, Inc. (NASDAQ:SRCL) is a compliance company specializing in disposing of medical waste. It ranks ninth on our list of George Soros’s top 10 holdings. The company collects and disposes of medical waste, sharps, pharmaceuticals, and hazardous waste. It also provides services for expired goods. The stock was added to Soros’ portfolio in the second quarter of 2024.
The company provides a range of solutions including biohazardous waste disposal, sharps waste disposal, pharmaceutical waste disposal, medical compliance solutions, collection kiosks, community solutions, and document shredding. It is to be noted, that the company is not just innovating the disposal domain, but it is also actively engaged in green activities. Stericycle, Inc. (NASDAQ:SRCL) renewed its partnership for the third consecutive year with Arbor Day Foundation to plant nearly 45,000 trees across the United States and Canada.
In the second quarter of 2024, the company logged $661.6 million in revenue, a decline from $669.5 million in Q2 2023. While the company is one of the largest holdings of Soros, it is to be acquired by Waste Management (WM) for $7.2 billion, including $1.4 billion in debt.
The deal is expected to come through in the fourth quarter of 2024 and will help WM expand its healthcare waste services segment. The deal will help WM generate over $125 million in annual run rate synergies and add to its earnings and cash flows within a year of the agreement.
