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Nintendo Slides After U.S. Hedge Fund Bets on Share Declines

Nintendo Slides After U.S. Hedge Fund Bets on Share Declines

(Bloomberg) -- Shares in Nintendo Co. slumped as a New York hedge fund increased its short bet against the company ahead of earnings Tuesday.

Nintendo dropped as much as 3.7 percent on Tuesday, the most in about a month, after Bloomberg News reported Gabriel Plotkin, head of Melvin Capital Management, had accumulated a short position of roughly $400 million in the Japanese game maker. Plotkin’s fund was short 1.2 million shares, or about 0.8 percent of Nintendo’s outstanding stock, according to the latest filing with the Tokyo Stock Exchange. The firm has been increasing its position, with the latest trade on July 26, ahead of Nintendo’s quarterly earnings on Tuesday.

Nintendo’s slump had left analysts and investors debating the reasons behind the decline. Some raised questions about whether long-term shareholders are losing faith in the outlook for the Switch game console. Shares fell as much as 27 percent from their peak in May.

Plotkin, a former star trader at SAC Capital Advisors, accounted for as much as 7 percent of Nintendo’s daily volume in recent weeks. His position is the largest such trade against the company since at least 2013, according to Bloomberg data.

Plotkin started his firm in December 2014 with the blessing and financial support from Steven A. Cohen, the controversial founder of SAC Capital. In 2015, Plotkin’s first full year in business, Melvin Capital returned 47 percent, putting him at No. 2 on Bloomberg’s global ranking of the top 50 hedge funds with more than $1 billion in assets. It has maintained that strong pace in recent years through bullish bets on Amazon.com Inc. and Netflix Inc.

Melvin Capital, which has about $7 billion in assets, would not explain its thesis for shorting Nintendo, with Plotkin and Chief Operating Officer David Kurd declining multiple requests for comment. The hedge fund employs a "bottom-up, fundamental" process for identifying stocks to buy and short, according to U.S. regulatory filings. It focuses on consumer companies and owned about 70 stocks including Electronic Arts Inc. and Twitter Inc., according to the latest filing in May.

The downward pressure on Nintendo shares has sowed confusion among executives, investors and analysts. The Switch became one of the fastest-selling consoles in history after its release last year, quintupling the company’s annual operating profit. Many analysts were bewildered when shares began dropping sharply in May, leading to the biggest gap in a decade between brokerage targets and the actual stock price. Goyal called the declines “shocking” at the time.

The chaos peaked in June during the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), when shares plunged 11 percent in two days. Analysts pinned it on a poor lineup of Switch titles at the show, but Nintendo executives hit back, blaming analysts for being short-sighted. Regulatory filings show Plotkin increased his short position on both days after E3 and continued short-selling in the following weeks. Melvin Capital accounted for 6.1 percent of volume on June 22 and 7 percent on July 17, according to the filings.

Not all investors are selling, with Nintendo’s largest shareholder Capital Group has used the market rout as an opportunity to increase its position. Shares rallied -- briefly -- after it disclosed the purchases.

It’s not clear how long Plotkin will stick with his short position. Hedge funds tend to make brief bets, in part because borrowing shares for shorting can be expensive over longer periods. On average, Melvin Capital has held stocks for about 8 months, according to all filings since 2014 analyzed by Bloomberg. The analysis did not include stocks it may have bought and then sold in the same quarter and also excluded options. The fund does not disclose how long it holds it short positions for.

Nintendo will report first quarter earnings on Tuesday after the market close. Analysts estimate revenue will rise 21 percent from a year earlier, while operating profit will jump 58 percent.

To contact the reporter on this story: Yuji Nakamura in Tokyo at ynakamura56@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Robert Fenner at rfenner@bloomberg.net, Peter Elstrom, Edwin Chan

©2018 Bloomberg L.P.