The Self-Proclaimed Cultists Obsessed With Bill Ackman’s SPAC Think a Deal Is Near — But They’ve Been Wrong Before

Some self-professed cultists investing in Bill Ackman’s SPAC, Pershing Square Tontine Holdings, now are betting on a deal announcement by mid-May.

These retail investors, posting on the Reddit forum r/PSTH, call it “hopium” — and it’s just the latest speculation from those who’ve been trying to time the deal, as well as figure out which company will be the SPAC’s merger partner.

The new speculation is based on an April 29 video interview with Ackman on “The Interactive Investor,” a British retail platform, in which the hedge fund manager said that Pershing Square Holdings, his UK-listed hedge fund, had sold its stake in Starbucks about a month ago and was replacing it with “a new investment we haven’t disclosed. You’ll will see the beginnings of disclosure of that probably with a filing we will make in mid-May.”

At another point during the interview, Ackman said, “But I think our most significant next investment will be the announcement of our SPAC.”

Reddit poster LloydvChristmas on Monday posted a spliced video of the two responses, suggesting that the SPAC deal announcement would therefore come “between tomorrow and middle of May.”

But as some Tontards, as the Reddit posters like to call themselves, pointed out, the two comments weren’t necessarily related. A Pershing Square spokesman confirmed to亚博赞助欧冠on Monday that Ackman was, indeed, talking about two different investments.

His mid-May reference appears to refer to the quarterly disclosures hedge funds file with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In these 13F filings, the funds list their publicly traded stocks held some 45 days earlier — in this case, at the end of March.

Regardless of the timing of its merger deal, Pershing Square Tontine, or PSTH, is the best-performing SPAC of those that have not yet announced a deal, having gained 27 percent since inception last July.

This year, however, PSTH has been victim to the selloff in SPACs: It hit its peak on Feb. 16, when it went as high as $34.10. It is now down 11.36 percent in 2021, though it rose 2.33 percent in April and closed near $25 on Monday.

The April rebound helped push Ackman’s Pershing Square Holdings up 4.2 percent4月，留下对冲基金，前四个月持续11.8％的收益。

“We are all in a PSTH support group”

The Reddit cultists have continued to stalk Ackman’s every move and parse every word — but their speculation has been costly in the past.

Many of them lost money betting an announcement would come by the end of the first quarter, given a comment by Ackman last November that he hoped to get a deal done in that time frame.

Near the end of March, however, in a letter that was part of the 2020 annual report for Pershing Square Holdings, Ackman said that he wouldn’t be able to make an announcement by the quarter’s end.

在这次失望之后，Reddit投资者希望Ackman会在他为4月22日给哈佛学生提供的讲话中发表交易公告。为什么？Ackman早些时候最初定于一周的谈话，不得不重新安排。

But, according to a Reddit poster who apparently was at the event, Ackman merely told the Harvard group that “the proof is in the pudding,” unleashing more than a dozen memes among the Reddit users. In last week’s interview, Ackman confirmed the statement. “As I’ve said, the proof is in the pudding, meaning we have to deliver on what we said we were going to do, and I’m confident we’re going to do that.”

Forum members — many of whom say they bought calls that expired worthless and added to their stock positions when the SPAC was trading higher — say they are trying to hang on.

“We are all in a PSTH support group,” one Tontine investor wroteII在Twitter上的直接留言中，说集团是“我们在我们自己分享新信息和”积极的氛围“。”

Many of these investors have moaned on Reddit about their losses — and some have gone directly to Pershing Square. In an email thatII被盲目复制，一个据称的33岁的零售投资者称他自己山姆洛链说，他已经变得如此相信，潘兴广场SPAC“是市场上最好的机会，手下来，我投入了100％的资产和我的联合投资账户与我的妻子进入股票。“

While Lopin said he had lost a “substantial portion” of his investment, and was embarrassed to tell his family about the losses, he didn’t seem to have despaired that he would one day profit. He closed the letter saying, “I truly hope a deal is right around the corner as you have hinted at before.”