Debut of Bill Ackman's new fund delayed but expected to proceed

By Svea Herbst-Bayliss

(Reuters) -The New York Stock Exchange said on Friday that the debut of billionaire investor Bill Ackman's new U.S. fund, Pershing Square USA, has been delayed, without providing a reason.

The initial public offering, which was expected to price on Monday, is now "pending on a date to be announced," the exchange said on its website late on Friday.

Ackman's firm said the deal is going ahead and a person familiar with his thinking said he hopes the pricing will occur as early as late next week or early the following week.

"Pershing Square USA. Ltd. is proceeding with its initial public offering (the 'IPO') of its common shares of beneficial interest (the 'Common Shares') with the date of pricing to be announced," Ackman's firm said in a release, echoing the exchange's statement.

No reason for the delay was given.

The delay marks the latest complication for the offering coming just days after the hedge fund manager asked his investors to chip in cash for the fundraising and told them he would raise much less money than initially planned.

Pershing Square USA, Ackman's first new fund in a decade, was initially expected to bring in as much as $25 billion in new capital and more than double his assets under management. This week Ackman said fund raising will now be capped at $10 billion and that he expected to raise between $2.5 billion and $4 billion.

The scaled back numbers were detailed in a letter Ackman sent to investors in his management company that he had planned to keep private. His lawyers said it needed to be made public on Thursday in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing.

Ackman, who has a big presence on social media platform X where he weighs in on topics ranging from political races, higher education and the dangers of sugary foods, hopes retail investors will find the offering as attractive as institutional shareholders.

He told his investors in the letter that one large pension fund and a prominent mutual fund had already committed.

But potential shareholders expressed some concerns about the structure of the new fund, how quickly the cash would be invested and who would do the investing, he acknowledged.

Since January, Pershing Square Holdings, his decade-old closed-end fund that provides his firm permanent capital, has returned 6.4%.

Since its launch two decades ago, Ackman's hedge fund returned 16.5% a year. Had it existed in its current form, Pershing Square USA would have returned 19.4% during that time, he said in a video to attract investors to the deal. Those returns would have outperformed the S&P 500 stock market index by 9.3 percentage points per year.

Over the last 6-1/2 years it would have returned 31%, he said in the video.

(Reporting by Svea Herbst-Bayliss in Providence and Arasu Kannagi Basil in Bengaluru; Editing by Tasim Zahid and Stephen Coates)