Two years after his first hoped-for, publicly traded, U.S. investment fund failed to launch, Pershing Square Capital CEO Bill Ackman is back. Never one to give up, Ackman has filed registration papers to replace the one that failed, adding a sweetener that will also give investors a stake in Pershing Square Capital Management.

But the timing raises questions. The markets have been shaky this year, and his flagship hedge fund has suffered. So far in 2026, Pershing Square Holdings was down 13.9 percent through March 10 — in contrast to a decline of about 1 percent for the S&P 500. 

Ackman doesn’t think that should give investors pause. In fact, he argues there is no better time to invest with him. “We are in the midst of a highly volatile market environment which has only been amplified by the launch of the war in Iran,” he wrote in a letter accompanying his fund registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission. While he acknowledged that investment banks often argue against listing in such environments because “IPO investors discount the price they are willing to pay for a company when risk premiums rise,” the same phenomenon will be a boost to the fund in looking for new stocks to buy.

“The greater the stock market disruption, the better for [Pershing Square U.S.’s] acquisition program,” he wrote. “Pershing Square has been a long-term beneficiary of the opportunity to buy superb companies at bargain prices driven by macro events that did not have a material impact on their long-term intrinsic values. We believe now is one of these opportune times.”

Pershing Square is currently long about 13 stocks, three of which are Magnificent Seven stocks, including Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta, which account for more than 30 percent of the portfolio. 

Some question why investors should pay Ackman a fee —  in this case a 2 percent management fee — for buying such names. All of these holdings are “known and easily accessible to investors,” former hedge fund manager Marc Rubenstein wrote on Net Interest, his Substack newsletter, after attending Pershing Square’s annual investor meeting in London last month. Ackman used to move the market when he announced stakes, but Rubenstein noted that when Pershing Square recently disclosed its investment in Meta, “the stock barely budged.”

Moreover, the portfolio has “no shorts, few special situations beyond stakes in Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac,” he added. “Just a handful of liquid, mega-cap names.” 

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which accounted for 10.8 gross percentage points of last year’s 26.5 percent gross gain, have fallen sharply this year, dropping about 45 percent as of March 16.

And the bloom has been off the rose on the Mag 7 stocks ever since questions arose about the debt tied to their huge data center investments: This year through March 16, Amazon is down about 9 percent, Alphabet is down almost 3 percent and Meta has fallen about 5 percent. (Alphabet was Pershing Square’s second-biggest winner last year, accounting for 10 percentage points of the gross gains.)

Ackman often touts his ability to predict and engage in asymmetrical bets, as he did during the Covid pandemic in 2020, as one reason to invest with him since investors can’t do that on their own. As evidence, he often points to the 70 percent gain he made during 2020, a record for the firm. Ackman benefited from Covid-induced market turmoil with a short bet on CDS indices that was based on his view that the pandemic would bring “hell,” as he put it on CNBC. 

But this year Ackman missed out on the surge of energy prices that have accompanied the war on Iran. In fact, at the Feb. 11 annual investor day, he told participants that no “black swans” appeared imminent, and the market for cheap, asymmetric trades looked thin, according to Rubenstein’s accounting of the meeting. That was a little more than two weeks before the war, and since then oil futures have jumped by almost 40 percent.

Pershing Square declined to comment.

In 2024, Ackman made his first effort to offer a fund that would be publicly traded in the U.S. and that reportedly would raise $25 billion. But big anchor institutional investors pulled out of the deal, causing him to kill it just days before it was set to go public. 

Ackman went back to the drawing board to come up with something better. This time he’s only trying to raise $10 billion. He also sweetened the deal by promising to give investors 20 shares in Ackman’s management company as a bonus for every 100 shares of the closed-end fund that they purchase.