This Billionaire Activist Is Targeting Amazon VIEW IN BROWSER By Michael Salvatore, Editor, TradeSmith Daily In This Digest: - Not all billionaires are created equal
- Here’s what this top performer just bought
- What Musk needs to do to be the world’s first trillionaire
- Turns out, bad news is bad news
- Jason’s latest top Quantum Edge leaders see a few surprises
Some billionaire investors just don’t have the stuff anymore… Most investors would safely assume billionaire investors know what they’re doing. One doesn’t become a billionaire with a poor track record. The latter part is true. Billionaire investors are made by sustained, exceptional runs of performance… or at least, headline-making big bets that turn out right. But just like it’s not possible to run at a full sprint for a marathon, not every billionaire investor can beat the market all the time. And some, over the years, have really lost their touch. We wrote you last year with a study of 27 billionaire portfolios we follow in our Billionaire’s Club software. As it turned out, there were some billionaire portfolios worth tracking… and some that weren’t: Out of the 27 billionaire portfolios we track, nine of them (one-third) have failed to beat the market for as long as we have data for. Ray Dalio is in this crowd, along with names like John Paulson, George Soros, and Charles Schwab. The worst of these is Michael Dell, who has put up just 8% of the S&P 500’s return. The best billionaires to track, it turns out, are the lesser-known ones. Jeffrey Ubben has beat the market by 7X, the top performer in our Billionaire’s Club. He’s trailed by Andreas Halvorsen (a 6.25X outperformer) and Chase Coleman (4.4X). In a coming software release, we’ll also start actively tracking the portfolio performance of each billionaire and will continue to update their holdings with each quarterly filing. So if you’re a subscriber with access to Billionaire’s Club, you have a lot to look forward to. But today, I want to take a look at some of the top stocks from our top billionaire, Jeffrey Ubben. | Recommended Link | | | | Elon Musk just secured a $29B handout from Tesla’s board to help “keep his energies focused.” It’s an obscene reward when the company’s much-hyped pivot from EV to AI is still unproven, and its Optimus robot has zero pre-orders. But there’s a much better play here… a little-known robotics stock already landing the kinds of huge deals Tesla can only dream of. This company’s robots are in such high demand, it’s already facing a $23 million backlog. Get the name, ticker and analysis free. No paywall. No strings. Full story here… |  | | Jeffrey Ubben is a name you probably haven’t heard before… But he’s worth getting to know. He founded ValueAct Capital in 2000, a firm focused on so-called “constructive activism.” Ubben and his firm take large stakes in companies that they believe have potential for improvement and use those stakes to influence the board and make changes. In 2013, for example, ValueAct took a $2 billion stake in Microsoft (MSFT) – then about 1% of the company. Soon after, longtime CEO Steve Ballmer resigned, and ValueAct’s CEO Mason Morfit soon joined the board. That intervention that would result in the appointment of Satya Nadella in 2014, the company’s current CEO and a major reason for Microsoft’s success for the last decade. Since then, MSFT stock is up nearly 1,400%. ValueAct is also credited with transforming Adobe (ADBE) into a cloud-based software services company starting in 2011. ADBE went on to soar nearly 2,000% at the 2021 peak and is up around 1,000% today. The approach has been proven to work. Not just that, this investment style shows us that following ValueAct’s large stakes can lead to outsized outperformance. So let’s look at what he’s bought recently… In Q2 2025, ValueAct vastly increased its stake in Amazon.com (AMZN), adding more than 3.3 million shares to a previous 500k. We can’t say whether this is a “constructive activism” play or not – those matters tend to play out behind closed doors. But what we do know is it’s a significant stake and a vote of confidence both in the business Amazon is now and what it could become. AMZN currently makes solid, if not exemplary, grades on both of our fundamental indicators… For the Business Quality Score (BQS) – TradeSmith’s proprietary rating of the most impactful business performance metrics – Amazon gets a “Strong Bullish” 84 out of 100 score. And for Jason Bodner’s Quantum Score – which combines fundamental growth metrics with technical momentum and institutional buying pressure – AMZN gets 69.1 out of 100. Not quite in the buy zone, but almost there: 
Our research shows that if you’re going to follow a billionaire investor, Ubben is the one to follow. And his latest big stake in AMZN – as a company in solid shape that could be even better – is supported by our systems. The path to the world’s first trillionaire… Tesla (TSLA) CEO Elon Musk is already the world’s richest person, and the competition isn’t exactly stiff. His net worth was estimated at $342 billion in the 2025 Forbes list, with Meta Platforms (META) CEO Mark Zuckerberg running a respectable-but-distant second at $216 billion. But what’s better than being the world’s richest person? Being the world’s first trillionaire. That’s what Tesla is now proposing, with an estimated $1 trillion compensation package for the CEO if the company hits certain milestones by 2035. Not only would the compensation be worth $1 trillion, but it also would also grant Musk about 25% of the company… something he’s said would be required for him to pursue his AI and robotics ambitions at Tesla. All he has to do to earn this pay package is expand Tesla’s market cap to $8.5 trillion and rapidly expand the robotaxi business – two goals very likely intertwined. Whether Musk can actually do this seems somehow secondary, and shareholders are likely to challenge the $1 trillion payday in court – just as they successfully did with his previous, now miniscule-seeming $56 billion pay package. More than anything, this pay package is about keeping him as the leader of Tesla for the foreseeable future. And it’s also about securing his focus on AI and robotics – including developing a stake in xAI, the developer of chatbot Grok – as part of Tesla’s business. TSLA shares were up close to 2% on the news in Friday’s early trading. To give the stock the same treatment as we just gave AMZN, here are its Business Quality Score and Quantum Score. Tesla gets 45 out of 100 for its BQS and 67.1 out of 100 for its Quantum Score – clearly some room for improvement: 
Tesla is the granddaddy of speculations. For its whole existence it’s shot for the moon and landed among the stars – and despite the expression, astronomy tells us the latter is actually further than the former. If anything, this compensation package suggests that the man responsible for Tesla’s success so far will be sticking around. And while fundamental and technical strength will always matter in any investment, Tesla holds that intangible quality of faith more than any other company out there. Jobs came in cold, and investors cheered… The Friday jobs numbers gave investors all the confidence they needed to bid the S&P 500 to new highs… at first. As I write at noon on Friday, the S&P 500’s big opening gain has shifted to a loss, down 0.4%. Unemployment rose at the fastest pace since 2021 in the Friday jobs numbers. Previous month’s revisions showed employment actually shrank in June, for the first time since 2020. Manufacturing and government jobs both fell, each now down 78,000 and 97,000 from the start of the year, respectively. This was first seen as all wonderfully bad news. A bad reading on the economy, for sure, but wonderful news for stock-market bulls. The primary bullish narrative right now is the prospect of a Federal Reserve rate cut. And this jobs report effectively locked in some kind of rate cut at the September Fed meeting. While the Fed had been keeping rates high because of inflation concerns, it also wants to support the economy. Numbers like this may force its hand. Odds of the Fed funds rate staying put dropped to zero, and odds of a 50-point cut sprang up from zero to 16%: 
Remember what we showed you last week: a falling Fed funds rate is not historically a good sign. But that all changes if the economy doesn’t see a recession. The old rule that defines “a recession” is two consecutive quarters of negative GDP. It was positive in the second quarter (up 3.3%), so we can’t possibly have “a recession” for at least two more quarters, if at all. And that means this coming rate cut – and the ones to follow – are more likely to act as market stimulus than as a lifeline for a struggling economy. Really, all areas of the market are sensitive to short-term rates, because the higher the yield on risk-free Treasurys, the smaller the incentive to be invested in stocks. But in particular, areas like tech, small-caps, and dividend payers like utilities companies should all benefit. With that in mind, let’s look at some of the best stocks across the entire market… My favorite way to do this is with Jason Bodner’s “Power 10”… This is a new feature integrated into TradeSmith Finance that shows us the top 10 stocks by Quantum Score. Here’s the list as of last Friday… 
It’s a mix of familiar faces like Alphabet (GOOGL), Shopify (SHOP), and Vital Farms (VITL)… And lesser-known companies like water management company Xylem Water Solutions (XYL), Chinese trucking logistics company Full Truck Alliance (YMM), and computer hardware company Credo Technology Group (CRDO ). This list always gives us new ideas to research, helping pick out the themes where Big Money is piling into ahead of the crowd. And that’s invaluable. If you knew Wall Street institutions were pumping millions into a stock… would you buy it? Of course you would. Our money flow tools like Jason Bodner’s Quantum Score let you find answers to those questions. All thanks to data that other investors don’t know exists, let alone have access to. Sometimes it’s nuclear stocks, like Vistra (VST). It had a great summer, but Jason’s tool found Big Money Buys dating all the way back to mid-2023. Following that first cluster of buy signals would have seen you riding a 570% wave higher in about two years: 
Nuclear stocks are a mega-theme that nobody was talking about back then – save for us here at TradeSmith. But most investors only woke up to it very recently – because they didn’t have signals like these. Jason’s whole job on Wall Street (for Cantor Fitzgerald) was to build multimillion-dollar positions like these on behalf of clients… without the crowd catching on. There are few people in the world today who know more about how to track giant Wall Street trades than he does. And you can click here to see how this system works – plus how it could help you make 5x the performance of the stock market by following the big money. To building wealth beyond measure, 
Michael Salvatore
Editor, TradeSmith Daily P.S. “Nvidia on steroids.” It’s hard to ignore a claim like that. And it’s even harder to believe it until you hear who said it. Those words come from Eric Fry, describing his next big idea about a company in AI space. Eric has a storied track record of finding 1,000% winners in the stock market. And they aren’t all fancy tech stories. He’s pulled in gains of 1,543% on gunmaker Sturm Ruger and Co. (RGR)… 2,045% on BHP Group (BHP)… and 3,591% in Humana (HUM). In the past, Eric found these opportunities the old fashioned way – by rolling up his sleeves and getting to work. But now, with a new system he’s called “Apogee,” he’s found a way to quantify the signals that have gone on to produce 10X winners. Eric’s putting on a free presentation all about the new Apogee system on Wednesday, Sept. 10, at 10 a.m. ET. Sign up here. (Disclosure: Michael Salvatore held shares of GOOGL, TSLA, and NVDA at time of writing.) | 
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