Point72 Owns 6.7M Square Shares

One big investor is getting on board with Square.

Billionaire trader/hedge fund guru Steven A. Cohen’s Point72 Asset Management firm said late last week in a regulatory filing that the firm took a 6.6 million-share stake in the firm, which equates to about 5.4 percent of the company’s class A equity shares outstanding, The Wall Street Journal reported.

That disclosure last Thursday (Aug. 18) would make Cohen’s company among the larger shareholders in the payments processing company, but Point72 also disclosed that there are no activist plans tied to that share accumulation (typically, investors amassing significant stakes in publicly held firms state whether they are passive holders or whether there is some other intent tied to the share accumulations, such as whether they seek changes in corporate strategy).

The more than 6 million shares were worth roughly $78 million as of the time of the filing. That’s not all that large considering the family office that runs the fund has $11 billion under management.

As has been widely reported, Square has been narrowing its losses, and sales growth in its latest quarter was a healthy 41 percent, with gross payment volumes rising slightly faster than that. The standout may have been that Square Capital loans grew by 123 percent in the quarter.

Forbes noted that the Point72 stakes make the investment vehicle the third-largest outside Square shareholder.