By Peter Rudegeair

Billionaire investor Bill Ackman relishes playing the role of contrarian. Plans he unveiled this week to take public both a new investment fund and his hedge-fund firm will have him swimming against the Wall Street tide in multiple ways.

The type of investment fund Ackman is looking to raise, a closed-end fund, has been out of favor with investors for years. Ackman first tried to raise this fund in 2024, envisioning it as his version of Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway. But he abandoned plans after investors were underwhelmed.

Meanwhile, he has cast his hedge-fund firm, Pershing Square, as a broader manager of so-called alternative assets. But now investor anxiety about private credit is denting the market values of firms such as Blue Owl Capital and Brookfield Asset Management that he once saw as comparables.

Ackman thinks he has a solution for the first problem. Solving the second will depend on how his pitch lands with investors in the coming weeks.

He is aiming to raise up to $10 billion for the new closed-end fund, Pershing Square USA, or PSUS. Investors in such funds can only exit by selling their shares to other investors on the open market.

Such funds often trade at a discount to the value of their underlying assets, which has made them targets for activist investors. Pershing Square Holdings, a London-listed closed-end fund that Ackman manages, traded at a roughly 24% discount to its net asset value as of the end of February.

Ackman abandoned his 2024 PSUS initial public offering after investors balked at buying the volume of shares he hoped to sell at the outset, thinking they could get them at a discount once they started trading instead. For PSUS's do-over listing, Ackman is sweetening the deal by giving those who participate in the fund IPO free shares in Pershing Square.

Ackman's name recognition could also help PSUS avoid PSH's discount. U.S. brokerages couldn't offer their retail customers access to an offshore investment fund like PSH. PSUS, on the other hand, can be directly marketed to individual investors stateside. Ackman can and likely will pitch his more than 2 million followers on X on the fund and its investments, hoping to drive more demand.

For Pershing Square, the hedge-fund firm, the goal of going public isn't to raise money for itself. But once its shares start trading, investors will look to comparable companies to inform how to value it. Public markets long ago soured on hedge-fund firms because of the unpredictability of their fee revenue.

When Pershing Square sold a stake to a group of investors in 2024 as a precursor to an eventual IPO, it told them not to compare it to other hedge-fund firms, but to much larger asset managers like Blue Owl and Brookfield. At the time, they were enjoying premium valuations.

Now, however, the share prices of Blue Owl and other alternative-asset managers are in retreat, in part because individuals invested in their private-credit funds want out.

So Ackman is highlighting Pershing Square's notable differences.

Pershing Square has no direct exposure to private credit, which has caused investor agita partly because such loans can be hard to value. Ackman's portfolio of a dozen or so large, publicly traded stocks are easier for investors to value. (One of its top holdings, ironically, is Brookfield Asset Management's parent company.)

Most private-credit fund managers allow for a small amount of investor redemptions each quarter, while closed-end funds like PSUS and PSH, which will account for nearly all of Pershing Square's assets under management, don't allow for that.

Private-credit fund managers are also under constant pressure to raise new funds to grow.

Because he invests in stocks and not credit, Ackman is telling investors he can compound his capital in a way that other types of publicly traded alternative-asset managers can't.

Write to Peter Rudegeair at peter.rudegeair@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

March 11, 2026 09:00 ET (13:00 GMT)

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