UPDATE 2-Soros Fund, AQR, Millennium bought NYCB shares in Q4

(This Feb 14 story was updated on Feb 15 to include the funds' assets under management)

By Carolina Mandl

NEW YORK, Feb 14 (Reuters) - A number of well-known fund managers bought shares of New York Community Bancorp in the fourth quarter of 2023, securities filings showed, before the troubled lender’s stock plummeted following an unexpected quarterly loss reported last month.

The funds' positions were revealed in securities filings known as 13Fs that hedge funds and other institutional investors file at the end of each quarter. Because the filings are backward looking, it was not possible to know if the funds still held their positions when NYCB's shares plunged.

Also, the documents do not show the funds' entire portfolio, including their bets against stocks. As a result, it is not possible to know if investors are long or short on a net basis.

Among the buyers were Soros Fund Management, the asset manager for billionaire George Soros' multi-billion dollar Open Society Foundations, which increased its position to 1,476,180 shares, worth $15 million at the end of the fourth quarter, its filing showed. The fund had owned 440,000 shares at the end of the third quarter.

Cliff Asness' AQR Capital Management, which manages $99 billion in hedge funds and long-only strategies, bought 4.1 million shares in the bank, adding to its third-quarter position of roughly 2 million shares. At the end of December, its position in NYCB was valued at $62.6 million.

Multi-strategy hedge fund Millennium Management, which manages $62 billion in assets according to its website, added almost 3 million shares in NYCB in the last quarter of 2023, to finish the year with 3.5 million shares.

Paul Tudor's Tudor Investment Corporation, with manages roughly $45 billion assets, bought a new position in the bank of 252,028 shares.

David Einhorn's Greenlight Capital, with $1.4 billion in assets, increased its shares by roughly 100,000, ending December with 1.8 million shares of the bank.

Shares of NYCB are down 54.6% so far this year. The bank on Jan. 31 reported a quarterly loss due to huge provisions for loans tied to the commercial real estate industry and slashed its dividend. (Reporting by Carolina Mandl, in New York; Editing by Ira Iosebashvili, Leslie Adler and Michael Perry)