(Bloomberg) - Shares of Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square USA Ltd. plunged 18% in its debut after the combined initial public offering for the closed-end fund and his alternative asset manager raised $5 billion.
Pershing Square USA closed at $40.90 per share on Wednesday, below the $50 price, while shares of the asset manager Pershing Square Inc. ended at $24.20, nearly 1% above their opening price. An investor who bought five shares in the IPO would be down roughly 9%, when accounting for the stock distributed in the management company, according to Bloomberg calculations.
The $5 billion haul was the bare minimum to keep the early investors who signed up to buy $2.8 billion locked into the deal, and fell well short of the lofty $25 billion that Pershing Square sought to bring in about two years ago.
Sweeteners including free shares of asset manager Pershing Square Inc. and no performance fee for Pershing USA increased interest from investors but didn’t do enough to stoke pandemonium.
“The gift of shares in the management company needed to overcome the divide that is the potential discount that this fund may trade at,” said Kim Flynn, president at Chicago-based XA Investments. “But that creates the question as to what will drive demand in the secondary market and make people buy this in six or 12 months?”
Pershing Square changed tack in the wake of its first closed-end fund flop, pivoting last year to boost its Howard Hughes Holdings Inc. stake to use as a vehicle for taking majority ownership of other firms. It now raised the largest closed-end fund listing in the US, data compiled by Bloomberg show.
Now, after initially setting out for a closed-end fund IPO as an appetizer to taking Pershing Square proper public, they’ve both debuted on the same day.
“It’s a bit of an experiment,” Flynn said.
Fund Deserves a Premium
Pershing Square USA deserves to trade at a premium to its net assets over time if the newly listed closed-end fund delivers the same outperformance his hedge fund firm has in the past, Ackman said Wednesday in an interview with Bloomberg Television.
“I do not know what happens in the first couple of days after an offering but with good shareholder communication keeping people informed, it will become a core holding,” Ackman said.
He intends to deploy the cash raised in the IPO within weeks, and noted that big existing holdings such as Uber Technologies Inc. and Meta Platforms Inc. looked cheap. Some of the best businesses in the world were trading at their lowest multiples ever in certain cases, he said in the interview.
“Those multiples bottomed two weeks ago, so we are a little off the all-time bottom but very bullish on the economy and there are some amazing businesses available at really cheap prices,” he added.
The combined IPO is certainly more generous than what Ackman first offered. The alternative asset manager, which went public in a form of a direct listing, was distributed on a one-to-five clip to most investors who bought the closed-end fund. Participants in a private placement got juicier returns: 1.5 Pershing Square Inc. shares for every five shares of the closed-end fund bought.
The parent company has roughly $30.7 billion in total assets under management with $20.7 billion of that in fee-paying assets as of the end of 2025, according to a Pershing Square Inc. filing.
Ackman’s London-listed closed-end fund has lagged the S&P 500 in recent years, trailing the index in one-year, three-year and five-year intervals, Bloomberg data show.
Since the original planned listing, closed-end funds have experienced a bit of a revival — albeit focused on private technology companies — with a string of similar listings drawing individual investors.
The Pershing Square IPO appears to have drawn a warmer reception than that of the Robinhood Markets Inc.’s Robinhood Ventures Fund I, which raised $658.4 million for a private-tech focused closed-end fund in March. Institutional participation accounted for roughly 85% of the Pershing Square offering, people familiar with the matter had said. That implies a retail cohort of about 15%, which would mean Ackman was able to generate $750 million in demand from individual investors.
Still, the underlying issue for buyers is the harsh reality that the vast majority of closed-end funds trade at steep discounts to their underlying holdings. Pershing Square Holdings Ltd., the firm’s more-than $18 billion London-listed closed-end fund, trades roughly one-third below its net asset value, data compiled by Bloomberg show.
By Bailey Lipschultz and Georgie McKay
With assistance from Anthony Hughes and Dani Burger
April 29, 2026
