Paulson Maintains Holdings in SPDR Gold Before Rally Falters

(Bloomberg) -- Billionaire hedge-fund manager John Paulson maintained his holding in the world’s biggest exchange-traded product backed by gold in the third quarter, before the bullion rally lost steam.

At the end of September, Paulson & Co. owned 4.36 million shares of SPDR Gold Shares, a U.S. government filing showed Tuesday. That’s unchanged from the three months through June. Bridgewater Associates, the world’s largest hedge fund, boosted its holdings in the ETF almost seven-fold, according to a regulatory filing on Nov. 13.

SPDR Gold attracted $672 million last quarter, helping send prices of the metal to a one-year high in September. The rally has since sputtered, with investors paring gold assets and rebalancing their portfolios amid a record-breaking rise in equities and bets that U.S. interest rates will rise further.

The metal for immediate delivery rose 0.2 percent to settle at $1,280.25 an ounce on Tuesday in New York, leaving prices little changed this quarter. This quarter through Monday, investors pulled $852 million from SPDR Gold.

Armel Leslie, a spokesman for New York-based Paulson & Co. with Peppercomm, declined to comment.

Filings released this month do not include hedge funds’ current position, which may have changed since the end of the quarter.

Paulson started his foray into gold in early 2009, betting that prices would rise amid unprecedented monetary stimulus. Bullion climbed 70 percent from December 2008 to June 2011 as the Fed bought debt and held borrowing costs near zero percent.

Paulson uses the SPDR ETF to back his funds’ gold share classes, which offer holdings denominated in bullion for investors interested in decoupling their assets from the value of the dollar.

Money managers who oversee more than $100 million in the U.S. must file a Form 13F within 45 days of each quarter’s end to list those stocks as well as options and convertible bonds. The filings don’t show non-U.S. securities, holdings that aren’t publicly traded, or cash.

To contact the reporter on this story: Luzi Ann Javier in New York at ljavier@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editors responsible for this story: James Attwood at jattwood3@bloomberg.net, Joe Richter

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