Pershing Square Reports Q2 2026 Results: Full Earnings Call Transcript

Pershing Square (NYSE: PS ) released second-quarter financial results and hosted an earnings call on Thursday. Read the complete transcript below. APIs provide real-time access to earnings call transcripts and financial data. Visit to learn more.

The full earnings call is available at Summary Pershing Square Inc. anticipates high growth due to the compounding of returns from its permanent capital vehicles and expects to see increased net asset value as underlying investments appreciate. The company plans to launch Pershing Square Ventures by the end of the year, aiming to provide public market access to venture capital opportunities, focusing on both early-stage and pre-IPO companies. Current market volatility allowed the company to invest at attractive valuations; however, they acknowledge that the market for their new public vehicle, PSUS, has been disappointing, trading at a significant discount to NAV.

The company has no immediate plans for new fund launches but is optimistic about future opportunities driven by performance of existing investments, such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Pershing Square continues to focus on high-quality, durable growth companies, using investment-grade leverage to optimize returns while maintaining a conservative approach to risk. Management is actively working to address the trading discount of PSUS through increased marketing and communication with financial advisors and investors.

Howard Hughes Corporation, a significant holding, is being transformed with a focus on insurance through its Vantage subsidiary, with expectations of significant value creation. The company is not currently hedging against market risks but continues to evaluate potential black swan events for future hedging opportunities. Full Transcript OPERATOR Good day and welcome to the Pershing Square 2026 second quarter earnings call. Today's call is being recorded.

All participants are in a listen-only mode. Following today's presentation, we will be taking questions from our phone audience. If you would like to ask a question, you may press star one on your telephone keypad to join the queue. It is now my pleasure to turn the conference over to Jill Chapman, Head of Corporate Investor Relations for Pershing Square.

Jill Chapman, Head of Corporate Investor Relations Thank you, Taryn. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Pershing's second quarter 2026 earnings call. Joining me today are our CEO and Chairman Bill Ackman and CIO Ryan Israel. com under the investor section.

We expect to file our 10-Q after market close today. Before we begin, I would like to draw your attention to the legal disclaimers at the end of our earnings presentation. Today's call may include forward-looking statements which involve risks and uncertainties and are not guarantees of future performance. Actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied in the forward-looking statements due to a variety of factors described under Forward-Looking Statements in our earnings presentation and IPO prospectus filed on April 30th, as updated by our most recently filed Form 10-Q.

We do not undertake any obligation to update forward-looking statements. We may also reference non-GAAP financial measures in response to questions. Reconciliations are included in our earnings presentation available on our website. Finally, please note that nothing on this call constitutes a prospectus, an offer to sell, or a solicitation of an offer to purchase our common stock or any interest or security in any Pershing Square fund or securities of any other person.

Furthermore, nothing on this call constitutes investment advice or an invitation or inducement to deal in securities. And with that I would like to turn the call over to Bill Ackman. Bill Ackman, CEO and Chairman Thank you, Jill. Welcome to our first earnings call for Pershing Square Inc.

You know, we spent the last 22 years listening to other people's conference calls and we learned from that, which is why we've taken the approach of the night before releasing earnings, releasing a detailed letter covering what we think are the key issues and considerations for the quarter, leaving the full hour for questions from analysts, shareholders, and other investors. We're going to follow this call with a space on X. You go to X, you can find the link. We're also reposting that, effectively replaying it.

You'll be able to listen to it afterwards. Expect that discussion to be more focused on the underlying investments in the Pershing Square portfolio. We're happy to take some of those questions now, but the emphasis is on our underlying holdings. One of the points we tried to make in the letter: what's interesting about this company is that if we never raise another investment vehicle and just sit with the three permanent capital vehicles we have today, this business will grow at a very high rate, in our expectation, because the underlying companies in which we've invested we expect will compound at a very high rate over time.

In fact, if we do nothing—we don't make another investment, we don't sell another security, we just sit back and allow the compounding of a dozen or more of some of the highest-quality businesses we know to occur—those earnings will compound. We believe those stocks will re-rate to a higher valuation. We think they're cheap as of this particular moment. That will cause a rise in our net asset value, the funds that we manage, and that will increase the fees and the performance fees that we receive from those vehicles, and the earnings stream will flow into the company.

We can just sort of sit back, and that's what makes this a really interesting business. Of course we want to optimize those portfolios over time, so we'll make some adjustments. We'll sell something that's reached our expectation of value. We'll buy something that's become very attractively valued.

We'll actually use some financial leverage in the way we manage those vehicles by issuing investment-grade debt—give us long-term returns—but on a quarterly basis what you'll see is a lot of the inherent volatility in stock prices. One of the things we talked about in the letter is that while the earnings trajectory of our companies is pretty continuous over long periods of time, the multiple that the market assigns to them—particularly in, I would say, an increasingly short-term market—is very volatile. So expect volatility in the underlying holdings.

But if you look at this business on a multi-year basis, think of it as a royalty on a look-through basis into the underlying growth and profitability of a business like Amazon or Meta, Microsoft or Alcon, Netflix, or so many others. I'm going to use that as just the high-level discussion, and why don't we open the call for questions. OPERATOR Thank you. If you are dialed in via the telephone and would like to ask a question, please signal by pressing star one on your telephone keypad.

If you are using a speakerphone, please make sure that your mute function is turned off to allow your signal to reach our equipment. If you find that your question has been answered, you may remove yourself from the queue by pressing 2. You may press 1 to ask a question. We'll pause for just a moment to allow everyone an opportunity to signal.

We'll take our first question from Craig Siegenthaler with Bank of America. Craig Siegenthaler, Analyst at Bank of America Good morning, Bill, Ryan. Hope you're both doing well. Bill Ackman, CEO and Chairman We're doing great.

Craig Siegenthaler, Analyst at Bank of America So, first one on fundraising. Can you update us on the timing and size of future fundraises, including asymmetric, crossover, and opportunistic? Bill Ackman, CEO and Chairman Sure. So we don't have any specific time frames in mind.

And in fact, we hadn't thought of the idea of Pershing Square Ventures until recently when it sort of became an obvious thing for us to do. So I would say future fund launches will be episodic. They'll depend on what's going on at the time in the business and when we think it's appropriate to do so. Our first fund launch will be Pershing Square Ventures.

I would say we're targeting kind of fall/end-of-year timing for that entity. Yeah, but again, the interesting point—maybe I didn't make it clear enough—we love launching new funds over time, but the big driver here is going to be the underlying performance of the existing entities. Let me just talk through a few thought experiments. For example, we own something like 230 million shares of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Stocks are trading at something like $5 a share. Our view is, in the event the administration does what the President has suggested they will do, these are $40, $50 stocks. Overnight our AUM goes up by potentially $8—$9 billion on the day the administration decides to release Fannie and Freddie or relist them—uplist them, if you will—on the New York Stock Exchange and address the outstanding senior preferred stock. That's just one investment in the portfolio.

With a base of AUM of about $23 billion of fee-paying assets, an overnight increase of a successful outcome on Fannie and Freddie could be a 30% increase in our permanent fee-paying assets. We finished the year strong. We're up 20%. 6 billion.

So our first priority is always going to be generating returns for our investors because one, that's the business that we're in; two, that's how you make a lot of friends; three, that's how we compound the value of our assets; and four, that's how it makes it more likely that we can launch new vehicles in the future. So yes, we love the notion of launching new funds over time, but our first priority is going to be driving the performance of our underlying investments. What's interesting about Pershing Square Ventures—where it's not overnight going to be a material addition to our fee-paying assets—our plan is to start small.

We do think it actually is strategically very valuable to us for, among other reasons, one of the reasons I got interested in venture 20-odd years ago is, one, it's fun and interesting and it keeps you optimistic about the future. But for our core business, it tells you what's coming. The biggest risk of investing, particularly in the current technological advancement world, is the risk of disruption. Well, where's disruption coming from?

It's coming from the 19-year-old that dropped out of Stanford that's building a company in a garage. Well, you want to understand what's coming. Just spending time looking at what's coming is interesting. So that's useful to our business.

And two, really it's probably the best time in American history in terms of identifying fast-growing, interesting, disruptive companies. 5 trillion valuation. I got to invest in SpaceX and X and xAI at much lower valuations. We want to bring that opportunity to the average person on the street, so to speak.

And that's what we intend to do with Pershing Square Ventures. And we're going to seed it with investments so people will know what they're investing in, and then we'll raise capital off of that base. We're limited in our ability to talk about that vehicle to basically what I've just described. But our plan is you'll find it interesting.

We'll talk more about it once we're actually positioned to file a document with the SEC. Craig Siegenthaler, Analyst at Bank of America Great. Thank you, Bill. OPERATOR We'll move to our next question from Matthew Heimerman with Citi.

Matthew Heimerman, Analyst at Citi Hey, good morning, everybody. Two questions. One was just 2Q was kind of an extraordinary period in the market in terms of lots of things being on sale. We know how the PSUS portfolio is shaping up.

I'm curious, had we not had quite the market volatility in some of the subsector declines we saw, how different the portfolio might be, because it is certainly giving you some diversification benefits in terms of the intermediate-term performance. And related to that, just curious how maybe intense the competition for your capital deployment was over that period of time. Bill Ackman, CEO and Chairman Look, I think one of the things I said on the roadshow—I said the ideal circumstance for us once we complete the IPO of PSUS is that we have enormous volatility in the markets and we're able to buy, create this portfolio at an attractive valuation.

And we were really served up with precisely that opportunity. It's much easier to buy stocks when they're going down than when they're going up. Now at PSUS, we're 95% invested. We're not going to mind if the market goes up from here because we've deployed our capital.

I would say in terms of competition, no one wanted to buy Microsoft or Meta or Alcon or Netflix. These were stocks that people still are valuing at certain discounts, although Visa and MasterCard—some of these new positions that we put on, as well as existing core holdings—became available at really significant discounts beginning around the time of the IPO. So that was not something that we could control, but obviously very helpful to us.

Ryan Israel (CIO) And I would just add, Matthew, I think on your point about the competition for capital, really the way we think about it—we wrote this in the letter—is that we've maintained this library of hundreds of companies that we think meet our business standards. Some of them we’ve followed for more than a decade. A lot of them we’ve followed for many years. And so we're always making this calculation of price to value based upon following these companies, seeing what we think the potential returns are over a longer time period.

We actually wrote about, for at least the investments that we hold, giving a little more insight as to how we think about that in terms of what these businesses could produce from their earnings, how we think about potentially the development of the changes in multiples that investors should assign if we're right in the future on those earnings. And I think the point is, broadly, we're always looking at our portfolio and saying, we follow all these companies—what are the best opportunities at any individual time?

To your question, your point, when the market is more volatile, that creates a much more interesting opportunity for us to find where investors have thrown out certain securities that we’ve followed for a long period of time. As a result, we think we can earn extraordinary returns that are generally, if we're fully invested, even better than the things that we own. So for some of our vehicles where we've had more investments, we had to make this decision about taking things that we liked, where the returns were good or great, and then deciding to sell some of them in order to fund even better opportunities in PSUs.

To Bill's point, we were very fortunate that we raised $5 billion in a very volatile market. And because we had this library and because the market was giving us this opportunity through volatility, we didn't have that same dynamic of trying to sell or needing to sell a position we like to find something even better. We were able to deploy capital into positions that were very attractively priced. We’ve seen a little bit of that attractiveness as the shares have rebounded really after the quarter ended to a large degree; we still think our opportunities are very attractive in what we own.

And I would say that library continues to grow and we continue to monitor it. So as the developments change in the future, to Bill's point in the opening remarks, there likely will be additional changes over time. But we feel very comfortable that if we just held this portfolio for the next five or even 10 years, we would get a very, very good result. Matthew Heimerman, Analyst at Citi Thank you for that.

I guess the follow-up question to that is with respect to the investment grade leverage that you'll eventually add to PSUs, I'm curious if from the outside we should think about the timing of that being dictated in part by whether or not you see a period like we just had in 2Q, or that that is something that would influence the size of how much leverage you put on, as opposed to when you put leverage on. Bill Ackman, CEO and Chairman Sure. So our timing for that is it's kind of full court press. We'd like a capital structure for PSUs which is basically 15% to 20% debt to total assets.

We take a very conservative approach. A typical hedge fund manager or some use leverage 8, 10, 12 times. 2 times. So very much an investment grade unsecured bond approach to financing high quality, durable growth companies.

It's kind of a component of our strategy. So we want to do it as promptly as practicable. We're beginning, I think early September, conversations and meetings with the rating agencies. We need to get the vehicle rated and then the plan would be to launch that offering.

And actually, if we had the incremental capital today, we have places to put it. Matthew Heimerman, Analyst at Citi Thank you. OPERATOR We'll take our next question from Dominic Gabriel with Loop Capital. Dominic Gabriel, Analyst at Loop Capital Hey, good morning everybody.

Congrats on the first earnings call. So I guess I just wanted to ask about the economic EPS and the fact that there's a pretty small equity risk premium, I believe, in the market today versus historically. And I'm just wondering how you guys think about a period of time where the equity risk premium is low like this and how you account for that in your expectations for risk management in your investments. I just have a follow-up.