Pershing Square portfolio (Allergan, Herbalife, Canadian Pacific, Air Products, Restaurant Brands, Platform Specialty, Zoetis, Howard Hughes, Fannie/Freddie)
Pershing Square's 2014 annual recap: 40.4% net return, Allergan sold at a 75% premium, Herbalife short down 52%, and a $2.8bn PSH IPO making 46% of AUM permanent capital.
Thesis
Pershing Square's 2014 annual investor presentation recaps a record year: 40.4% net return versus the S&P 500's 13.7%, with Allergan contributing 19.1% of gross gains after Valeant's $153 unsolicited offer and Actavis's eventual $219 acquisition (75% premium to Pershing's $128 cost). The Herbalife short delivered 6.1% as the stock fell 52% amid FTC, DoJ and state AG probes, and worldwide volume points growth collapsed from +13% to -2%. The October 2014 Euronext Amsterdam IPO of Pershing Square Holdings raised $2.8bn, lifting permanent capital (including GP and affiliates) to 46% of firm AUM. The deck also recaps Air Products (new CEO Seifi Ghasemi, 22.5% EBIT-margin target to match Praxair), Canadian Pacific (Hunter Harrison delivering 64.7% operating ratio), Restaurant Brands (Tim Hortons merger), Platform Specialty, Zoetis (8.5% stake), Howard Hughes, and the Fannie/Freddie net-worth-sweep litigation.
The three reasons
- 1
40.4% net return in 2014 vs S&P 500's 13.7%, driven by Allergan's sale to Actavis at a 75% premium to cost
- 2
$2.8bn PSH IPO made permanent capital 46% of firm AUM, enabling longer-duration activism
- 3
Herbalife short validated: stock fell 52% in 2014 amid FTC, DoJ and multi-state probes
KPIs cited
Pattern membership
Slide gallery ·
Notes
Fund-level annual investor update rather than a single-target campaign deck, so SCQA fields, closing_ask, primary_demands and stake_disclosed_pct are null (multiple positions, no single ask). Format: per-position logo divider slide, followed by thesis recap + annotated stock-price timeline. Strongest slides are the annotated timelines (Allergan p27, Herbalife 2013 timeline p30, Herbalife 2014 timeline p31, CP since-inception p45) and the PSH IPO structure diagram (p16). Ackman is not explicitly signed on a cover page but is credited as CEO & Portfolio Manager in the org chart (p74). The Herbalife quote-contradiction comes from Chairman's Club member Stephan Gratziani on 'inauthenticity' of the business — a top distributor rather than C-suite, but used in exactly the same adversarial way. Visual template is standard institutional Pershing Square (blue headers, Calibri, lots of annotated Bloomberg line charts).