Element Capital Management once again turned sharply bearish on U.S. stocks.
The macro hedge fund firm headed by Jeffrey Talpins liquidated most of its U.S. stock portfolio in the second quarter. It slashed the total value of the portfolio by about 90 percent, from $402 million to about $41 million at the end of June, according to the firm’s latest 13F quarterly filings.
It sold virtually all of its stock positions, leaving it with just three different issues. It had held 147 different issues in the first quarter after establishing 145 new positions during the period.
Element declined to comment.
The firm has swung wildly in and out of U.S. stocks for the past few quarters. At the end of fourth-quarter 2024, it held just $10 million in four U.S. stocks after unloading virtually all of its $2.2 billion stock portfolio.
Altogether, Element managed a total of about $3 billion at the beginning of 2025, 90 percent of which was held by insiders after it returned $6 billion to investors last year, Bloomberg reports. Several years ago, Element managed as much as $20 billion.
It invests mostly in fixed-income, foreign exchange, and equity markets, according to a regulatory filing. On its website, the firm says it “integrates macro fundamental, systematic, and relative-value analysis in the formation and implementation of directional views.”
One of the three remaining U.S. stock positions was newly established in the second quarter. Element bought 250,000 shares of Brown & Brown, making it the largest of the holdings. It is an insurance brokerage firm specializing in risk management. The stock is down about 25 percent since the end of March.
Element’s two other stocks are CME Group and SPDR S&P Homebuilders exchange-traded fund.
Shares of CME Group — which operates financial derivatives exchanges including the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, the Chicago Board of Trade, the New York Mercantile Exchange, and the Commodity Exchange — are up nearly 20 percent for the year. Element cut its position by about 25 percent in the second quarter.
The Homebuilders ETF is up 5.4 percent in 2025.
Element was up 22.5 percent in 2024 after losing money in each of the three previous years. It is unknown how it is performing this year, how its non-equity strategies are currently invested, or what the current asset allocation is.
