Inside the portfolio: Pershing Square Capital Management, L.P., Q4 2025
Souppe looked through Pershing Square Capital Management, L.P.'s Q4 2025 disclosed long-equity book and found a clear structure: strong growth capture, high liquidity, concentrated downside protection.
About this portfolio
Pershing Square Capital Management, L.P. is an investment manager. According to public filings (Form ADV and IAPD profile), this manager files 3 private fund reports. Our analysis uses the manager-level long-equity holdings disclosed on the Q4 2025 13F filing, so the read is the consolidated long US-listed book across those funds, not the per-fund slice. The disclosed book totalled $15.5 billion across 11 positions at the snapshot.
Three things to keep in mind about a 13F-based read. It does not show cash, it does not show shorts, it does not show derivatives in the same way the equity positions appear. It also does not show private holdings, many non-US securities, or the manager's full economic picture. What follows describes the structure of the book Souppe could see.
How Pershing Square Capital Management, L.P.'s portfolio scored
Souppe scored the Q4 2025 book at 66 out of 100, labelled Moderate. Read it as a high-quality growth book, not a defensive book. The model scores it well on liquidity, on names holding up together in tail episodes, and on the stability of its sensitivity to the market. The weakness sits in one specific dimension, and the rest of this post explains where it comes from.
The composite blends 8 structural risk dimensions: how spread the holdings are, how spread the sectors are, how the book behaves in a drawdown, how much of its return is driven by broad-market moves, how its names move together in stress, how liquid the holdings are, and how stable its sensitivity to the market has been over time. A score of 66 places the book above the rough median we observe across active managers in our sample, and below the 80-and-above range we treat as structurally robust.
Most of the dimensions read clean. Trading Liquidity scored 97, Diversification Quality 89, Tail Behaviour 89, Market-Sensitivity Stability 87. The book is easy to trade, the holdings spread risk efficiently, the names hold up together in tail episodes, and the book's sensitivity to the broad market has been stable over time.
The pull is concentrated in one place. Downside Protection scored 32 out of 100 (Concentrated). That is the structural feature the rest of this post explains.
Where the portfolio gets paid
The regime profile shows the trade-off directly. Crash-Resistant 32, Growth 100, All-Weather 32, all on a 0 to 100 scale. Read together: this is a portfolio built to participate, not to absorb. Most of the book is positioned to benefit from the parts of the cycle that reward a growth tilt. Much less of it is positioned to cushion the parts that punish the same tilt.
The weakest regime is Stress. Souppe's model estimates an expected monthly return of -3.4% in that regime for this book.
As a historical stress reference, not as a forecast, the model replays the Global Financial Crisis with the book held constant at its Q4 2025 structure: same positions, same weights, run through how the broad market and the underlying drivers actually moved in 2007 to 2009. The estimated drawdown is roughly -71% at the trough, against a broad-market drop of -52%. The point of the exercise is to size the trade-off. That ~19-percentage-point gap is the visible cost of the growth tilt, set against the upside the same tilt earns in the two other regimes.
Where the portfolio is thinnest
Two mechanics combine to produce the 32 on Downside Protection.
The first is sector concentration. The book leans hard on a handful of sectors. The top 3 are Consumer Discretionary at 46% (5 holdings), Communication Services at 25% (3 holdings), and Financials at 18% (1 holding). Together they hold 90% of the disclosed book. In structural terms that is roughly 3.1 effective sectors out of 4 represented sectors. Souppe labels that mix Highly Concentrated.
The second is co-movement with the market in a stress drawdown. The model estimates a stress sensitivity of 1.36. A broad-market drawdown of 10% maps to roughly 14% of portfolio decline before idiosyncratic moves.
Read these two mechanics together: a small set of sectors carries most of the book, and the names that fill those sectors amplify market moves rather than dampen them. The growth tilt earns its return on that amplification, and pays for it in the regimes the book is least set up to weather.
How the holdings sit together
The top 5 positions account for 73% of the book.
- BN.US (Brookfield Corp) at 18.3%
- UBER.US (Uber Technologies Inc) at 16.0%
- AMZN.US (Amazon.com Inc) at 14.4%
- GOOG.US (Alphabet Inc Class C) at 12.5%
- META.US (Meta Platforms Inc.) at 11.4%
Position-level concentration translates to roughly 7.6 effective holdings, which Souppe labels Moderate. By sector, the book is weighted Consumer Discretionary at 46%, Communication Services at 25%, Financials at 18%, Real Estate at 10%.
A few of the larger positions read all-weather or defensive at the position level on Souppe's structural scoring. The book is not monolithically growth-heavy at the name-by-name view. The aggregate profile is, because the names that carry the most weight are the ones that move with the market the most.
The structural read
Pershing Square's disclosed Q4 2025 book reads like a high-quality growth book, not a defensive book. Souppe scores it well on liquidity, on diversification quality, on tail behaviour, and on the stability of its market sensitivity. The weakness sits in downside protection, where sector concentration and stress sensitivity combine to make the visible book more exposed in drawdowns than the broad market.
That is what the model surfaces. The 13F does not tell us how the rest of the manager's book is structured. Within what the filing does show, Souppe's read is that this slice is set up to compound in the parts of the cycle that reward growth, and to take more than its proportional share of the parts that punish it.
Reading the Pershing Square filing
The filing, Q4 2025
Filing AUM $15.5B
Positions 11
- Sectors represented 4
- Private fund reports 3
- Top-5 holdings share 73%
- Independent bets 3.3
Structural risk profile
Composite score 66 / 100
Weakest dimension Downside Protection 32 / 100
- Trading Liquidity 97 / 100
- Diversification Quality 89 / 100
- Tail Behaviour 89 / 100
- Market-Sensitivity Stability 87 / 100
Regime profile
Growth 100 / 100
All-Weather 32 / 100
- Crash-Resistant 32 / 100
- Weakest regime Stress
- Expected monthly return in Stress -3.4%
- Modelled GFC trough -71% (broad market -52%)
Concentration profile
Effective holdings 7.6
Effective sectors 3.1
- Largest position BN.US at 18.3%
- Top sector Consumer Discretionary 46% (5 holdings)
- Sector concentration reading Highly Concentrated
- Position concentration reading Moderate
Every number sourced from the Q4 2025 Pershing Square Capital Management case study report. Derived from SEC 13F filings.