Sosin Partners, with its big bet on Carvana, continues to be one of the best performers this year. But over the past six months or so, it has been scaling back its huge investment.
The firm is up 62 percent for the year even after giving back five percentage points in August, according to a hedge fund database. As Institutional Investor has chronicled for some time, Sosin is a very concentrated fund whose bet on online used-car company Carvana has fueled significant gains in recent years.
Carvana is one of just four stocks that Sosin owns. It closed Friday at about $392 and has nearly doubled again this year. Since December 2022, it has swelled a hard-to-believe 98 times.
Now the hedge fund is quietly taking some money off the table. In the first half of this year, it sold 23 percent of its position, including more than 13 percent in the second quarter, according to regulatory filings. In fact, Sosin has subtracted a little of its position in most quarters since the beginning of 2024. Still, the stock accounted for 80 percent of Sosin’s capital at the end of June thanks in part to price appreciation, according to the most recent 13F filing.
In 2024, Carvana reported $990 million in operating earnings, its first operating profit on $13.7 billion in revenues — roughly a 30 percent increase. In the first half of 2025, Carvana had $511 million in operating earnings.
The hedge fund is headed by Clifford Sosin, who in 2012 founded Sosin Partners and CAS Investment Partners, which manages the fund.
You have to hand it to Sosin for his Carvana conviction.
Back in 2022, Sosin was down 77 percent just two years after it had nearly doubled its investors’ money. That year, Carvana’s stock plummeted by 98 percent amid concerns that the company would file for bankruptcy, closing the year at $4.79. In the middle of third-quarter 2021, when the stock peaked at about $360, Carvana had accounted for nearly half of Sosin’s assets.
But Clifford Sosin maintained a strong belief in the company, buying Carvana’s stock as the price dropped in the first half of 2022. The firm added 25 percent to its stake in the first quarter of that year and an additional 61 percent in the second quarter.
As previously reported by II, Clifford Sosin said his firm had significant participation in Carvana’s April financing, when the company issued $1.25 billion of stock at $80 per share and placed $3.25 billion of senior unsecured notes at what Sosin deemed “the fairly high rate” of 10.25 percent. “We participated in the offering, buying more than our pro rata share and thus somewhat increasing our position and our percentage ownership of the company,” he explained.
Sosin acknowledged at the time that 2022 was “something of a lost year" and the company would likely have to better manage growth and fund it from internal cash. He added, “This all means a slower, albeit longer and more cash-generative, growth ramp. Conversely, Carvana’s competitive position and efficiency will likely benefit from this episode and the "experience will make the company stronger.”
Sure enough, Carvana then took off. After losing 77 percent in 2022, Sosin Partners rode Carvana’s stock rise to gains of 80 percent in 2023, 94 percent in 2024, and 62 percent so far in 2025.
