By Svea Herbst-Bayliss
(Reuters) -The New York Stock Exchange said on Friday the debut of billionaire investor Bill Ackman’s new U.S. fund, Pershing Square USA, has been postponed, without giving a reason.
The IPO, which was expected to take place on Monday, is now “pending a date yet to be announced”, the stock exchange said on its website late on Friday.
Ackman’s company said the deal is moving forward, and a person familiar with its thinking said he hopes pricing will happen as early as late next week or early next week.
“Pershing Square USA. Ltd. is proceeding with its initial public offering (the “IPO”) of its common shares of beneficial interest (the “Common Shares”) with a pricing date yet to be announced,” Ackman’s company said in a statement a press release. , following the stock exchange’s statement.
No reason was given for the delay.
The delay marks the latest complication for the offering, just days after the hedge fund manager asked investors to raise cash for the fundraising and told them he would raise far less money than initially planned.
Pershing Square USA, Ackman’s first new fund in a decade, was initially expected to raise as much as $25 billion in new capital and more than double its assets under management. This week, Ackman said fundraising would now be capped at $10 billion and that he expected to raise between $2.5 billion and $4 billion.
The scaled-back figures were detailed in a letter Ackman sent to investors in his management company that he planned to keep private. His lawyers said it should be made public Thursday in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing.
Ackman, who has a large presence on social media platform
He told his investors in the letter that a major pension fund and a leading investment fund had already committed.
But potential shareholders raised some concerns about the structure of the new fund, how quickly the money would be invested and who would make the investments, he acknowledged.
Since January, Pershing Square Holdings, his decade-old closed-end fund that provides his company with permanent capital, has returned 6.4%.
Since launching 20 years ago, Ackman’s hedge fund has returned 16.5% per year. If it had existed in its current form, Pershing Square USA would have returned 19.4% in that time, he said in a video to lure investors to the deal. These returns would have outperformed the stock market index by 9.3 percentage points per year.
Over the past 6.5 years, it would have returned 31%, he said in the video.
