Morning Brief: Pershing Square Reduces Stake in a Winning Bet

Shares of Automatic Data Processing fell 1.1 percent Wednesday to $116.10 after Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square Capital Management disclosed in a regulatory filing it sold about 5 million shares of the company. Pershing Square still owns a 7.2 percent stake in ADP. The payroll outsourcer was Ackman’s second biggest winner among six profitable positions in 2017, when Pershing otherwise lost money, according to the firm’s annual report. The stock is up 33 percent since the beginning of October.

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ValueAct Capital sold 2.35 million shares of Armstrong World Industries for $59.60 a share on March 12, according to a regulatory filing. The sale reduced the firm’s stake in the maker of walls and ceilings to 12.9 percent.

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Steven Cohen’s Point72 Asset Management disclosed in a filing that it owns nearly 8.5 million shares of Alta Mesa Resources, or 5 percent of the exploration and production company. Alta Mesa Resources was created earlier this year by combining the upstream assets of Alta Mesa Holdings LP with the gas processing assets of Kingfisher Midstream LLC.

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Caxton Corp. disclosed in a filing that it owns 4.87 million shares of SCYNEXIS, or about 10 percent of the biotech company. The macro specialist did not own any shares of SCYNEXIS at year-end. The firm then only held 18 individual U.S. common stocks, excluding exchange traded funds.