“Mysterious” billionaire cashes Gates-backed shares worth $ 127 million

Hi-tech drug research firm Schrödinger, Inc. (SDGR) is up 100% since it went public earlier this year, and one of Wall Street’s “most intriguing and mysterious” billionaires has just made money.

David Shaw, the mysterious 69-year-old investment legend, sold more than $ 127 million worth of SDGR shares in the past month alone.

During this time, the SDGR share price was between 217% and 233% above the issue price of $ 17 in February – – impressive, but well below SDGR’s record high of $ 93 in September.

According to the finance portal Finviz, these are Shaw’s first share sales in the whole year. The steps were made in accordance with a preset trading plan filed with the SEC in August.

Shaw has long been serious about SDGR; Crunchbase dates Shaw’s initial investment of $ 31 million as early as 2001. The SDGR website even highlights that moment in the promotional timeline. He holds approximately $ 800 million in SDGR shares.

David Shaw is a stock market legend

Indeed, the mostly retired Shaw is famous among Wall Street insiders. His Fonds DE Shaw & Co. was one of the first “quant” stores in the industry to use powerful computer algorithms to identify lucrative short-term trading signals.

The Financial Times noted that DE Shaw & Co’s composite fund has posted only one year loss since 2001 (2008) and has made double-digit gains for seven of the past 10 years. This year, however, the outlook is somewhat bleak.

But Shaw isn’t the only celebrity billionaire deep into the SDGR. Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates is also there, buying nearly $ 100 million worth of SDGR stock during his IPO.

Gates also invested $ 85 million in venture capital for the company last year. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation currently holds approximately $ 320 million worth of SDGR shares.

In fact, Shaw and Gates own around 40% of all SDGR stocks. This gives the two billionaires a tremendous leverage over the company, a situation in which Citron Research’s short sellers are even more extreme than Tesla’s musky power structure.

“Aside from the ‘dollars invested’, the essence of the investment made by these two men, who are known for their intellectual abilities, is the confirmation that Schrödinger is at the forefront of using artificial intelligence and computational chemistry to streamline the drug discovery process.” he wrote to Citron analysts in February.

“After resigning from DE Shaw, David Shaw dedicated his life to computational biochemistry. Schrödinger is the result of much of this work. ”

[Read: Tech’s market debutantes overshadowed by Gates-backed pharma stock]

How much SDGR stock Gates dumped in 2020: $ 129.5 million, a few million more than Shaw, and the two billionaires combined are responsible for more than 80% of all SDGR Insider sales since the start of the year .

Published on October 12, 2020 – 14:42 UTC