Alphabet, Nike and gold: the most notable investment guru deals in 2025

The market likes to follow the actions of legendary investors, trying to understand their logic. And 2025 provided rich food for analysis: gurus' strategies ranged from unexpected technology bets to admitting multimillion-dollar mistakes. Warren Buffett surprised with his purchase of Google, Michael Burry with his return to the mortgage sector he once shorted. We've collected six notable cases of the year, from David Tepper's perfect timing to Stanley Druckenmiller's work on mistakes.

Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway made two significant acquisitions in 2025: UnitedHealth in the second quarter and Alphabet in the third. Given that the fund continued to build cachet (by the end of the third quarter, Berkshire's cash reserves reached an unprecedented $381 billion - exceeding the value of its entire public equity portfolio), investing in these companies was particularly telling.

At the end of the third quarter Berkshire announced the acquisition of 17.9 million shares of Alphabet for $4.3 billion, which came as a surprise to the market: traditionally Buffett invests in undervalued assets. According to the market, the deal was initiated by Berkshire's portfolio managers. But Buffett himself admitted back in 2018 that he missed a chance with Google: "I saw how the product worked, and I knew what its profit margins were. But I didn't know enough about technology to know if it was really the product that would stop the competition." Alphabet's shares jumped immediately after the deal was disclosed, and the securities have risen more than 60% since the beginning of the year.

The entry into UnitedHealth looks like a classic Buffett deal - buying a quality but deeply unpopular business at a time of crisis. Berkshire invested in the company in the second quarter - amid a sharp stock collapse (-22%in a day), regulatory investigations and a reputational blow related to the assassination of the head of the insurance unit in late 2024. Buffett's fund bought more than 5 million shares of UnitedHealth Group for $1.6 billion. It was a pure value bet: the largest private insurer in the U.S. was trading at its lowest multiples in a decade. It's still unclear whether the deal went to the upside: a calculation based on the average share price for the quarter indicates that the current market value of the stake is still inferior to the amount invested, but one of Buffett's most famous quotes reads, "Our favorite holding period is forever."

The most ironic deal of 2025 is Michael Burry's disclosed bet on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in December. The investor, whose name is associated with the 2008 collapse of the U.S. mortgage market, said, "I personally own shares of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in significant amounts." Burry emphasized that he views this position as an investment for at least three to five years.

In the early 2000s, Burry was one of the harshest critics of the mortgage agencies: he called Freddie Mac "Frauddie Mac" and invested in instruments that profited in the event of massive mortgage defaults. In 2008, this scenario came true: the housing market collapsed, and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were at the center of the crisis and were placed under the control of the government, which spent $191 billion to save them. Since then, the companies have been under federal supervision, and their profits are largely received by the U.S. budget.

In 2025, Burry changed his stance: the investor who predicted the mortgage crisis is now playing upside in the same sector. After revealing his position, Fannie Mae shares rose 3.9% in a day on the OTC market, while Freddie Mac shares rose 3.1%. On his blog, he wrote, "Once companies IPO and get rid of capital constraints, I expect their growth to accelerate naturally." Burry expects the IPO price of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to be in the range of 1-1.25 times their book value, with the potential for their shares to trade at a 1.5-2 multiple within a year or two of listing.

Bill Ackman's Pershing Square hedge fund lost more than $600 million on Nike securities in 2025: the fund exited the position entirely, recording a loss of about 30%. Ekman's quarterly call began with the words, "We had a successful year... but we don't do everything perfectly."

Pershing Square started buying Nike in the second quarter of 2024 on the decline of the securities - at $75-97. The first purchase amounted to about 3 million shares worth about $229 million. By the end of 2024, the fund was building up the position (in the portfolio it reached 11%, it was the sixth largest position in the fund). The expectation was that the return of company veteran Elliott Hill as CEO would restore the company's "magic" and correct the mistakes of his predecessors. In early 2025, Ackman converted the stake into call options. "If the transaction is successful, the option payout should be more than double the return from owning common stock," Eckman wrote in a letter to investors.

But Ekman's bet didn't work - Nike's fundamentals have deteriorated: the company is struggling in China and has faced pressure from new U.S. trade duties. In November 2025, Pershing Square completely closed the position with a loss of more than $600 million - that's about 30% of invested capital. "In business transformation situations, the return 'filter' needs to be tighter, even if the crisis doesn't look very serious. If we had built a higher rate of return into our calculations from the outset, we probably just wouldn't have entered this deal," Pershing Square summarized.

In 2025, David Tepper, founder of Appaloosa Management, made a short-term trade in Intel stock. During the second quarter, the fund bought about 8 million shares for about $179 million at an average price of $22.56 per share. At the time of the entry, Intel stock was trading near its lows of more than a decade as the company was losing processor market share, incurring high costs to retool its manufacturing operations and remaining under pressure from weak financial results from previous years.

Almost immediately after Tepper bought Intel shares, the quotations began to grow. In August, it became known that SoftBank was investing $2 billion in the company, and in September, Nvidia announced a strategic partnership with Intel and an investment of $5 billion.

This news became the drivers of sharp growth of shares: in some days the securities rose above $40 per share. In September, the company's quotations showed the strongest one-day growth in almost 40 years. Three months after the purchase, Tepper fully closed the position, generating about $205 mln.

In 2025, DoubleLine Capital founder Jeffrey Gundlach was betting on gold - in an interview with CNBC, he said, "I still believe that 25 percent gold in a portfolio is not excessive. I think it's a kind of insurance policy." In classic portfolio recommendations, the share of gold is usually estimated at 5-10%, and Ray Dalio, a well-known investor, recommends to keep 10-15% of the portfolio in gold.

Gundlach attributes his high bet on gold to the weakness of the dollar and U.S. budget problems. In his opinion, because of the growing deficit and the cost of servicing the national debt, treasury bonds no longer work as a protective instrument. Under these conditions, their place is taken by gold, which is becoming the main neutral reserve. This trend, the investor noted, is confirmed by the actions of global central banks: they are actively buying metal, reducing the share of the dollar in their reserves.

"People are starting to look at gold as a full-fledged asset because of fear. Fear of geopolitical chaos, tariffs and all that, and also because of the sheer volume of debt - people just don't understand how we're going to deal with it. So gold becomes the only truly hard currency," Gundlach said in May 2025. But in October, as the gold price soared to $4400 an ounce, he announced a partial profit-taking and reduced the gold share to 10%, explaining that it was necessary to rebalance after the sharp rise.

In 2025, Stanley Druckenmiller returned to Big Tech. This followed his exit from Nvidia in 2024, a deal that the investor later called a "big mistake," admitting he sold the stock too early.

This year Duquesne Family Office, the asset manager of Druckenmiller, made a large bet on shares of leading US technology companies: in the third quarter it opened new positions in three companies of the "Magnificent Seven" at once. The fund bought 437,000 shares of Amazon, 102,200 shares of Alphabet and 76,100 shares of Meta Platforms, investing a combined total of about $176 million in these securities. These companies have already appeared in Druckenmiller's portfolio in different years, but it was in 2025 that he collected them simultaneously in a noticeable volume.

Druckenmiller attributed his actions to his assessment of the current market phase. In an interview with CNBC, he said, "The hype around AI may look a little overblown right now, but in a few years, we'll probably be saying it was undervalued over the long term." Duquesne Family Office's third-quarter 2025 portfolio continues to have a notable share of technology and AI-sensitive assets, with Druckenmiller actively rotating within the sector: reducing positions in some of the former favorites, including Broadcom, and moving capital into Amazon, Alphabet, Arm and other AI beneficiaries.

This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor