Al Gore Bought The Dip On This Bill Gates Company

Investment in software juggernaut Microsoft Corporation MSFT was increased in the second quarter by Generation Investment Management, which made other significant portfolio changes. Former Vice President Al Gore is co-founder and chairman of the company.

Let's thumb through the filings.

First, Some Background: Founded in 2004, Gore alongside finance guru David Blood started the hedge fund with a keen focus on environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing.

The fund gives the Generation Foundation 5% of distributable revenues each year. The foundation is a nonprofit organization with the objective to promote the urgent transition to an equitable society where the global temperature rise does not exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius, in accordance with the Paris Agreement.

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The Trades: A form the fund submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for the second quarter included information about the company's purchases of Microsoft, among other issues.

The company bought 3.7 million Microsoft shares to end the second quarter with 4.2 million shares.

Microsoft stock is down nearly 24% year-to-date, compared with an almost 18% drop in broad market indexes.

Generation also purchased 7.4 million shares of downtrodden Shopify Inc SHOP stock, which lost a whopping 77.9% of its value year-to-date.

In the second quarter, the company liquidated all 3.2 million shares of Visa Inc V it owned, in favor of picking up 2 million shares of competitor Mastercard Inc MA.

Mastercard is down nearly 13% year-to-date, and Visa is down 10.25% in the same time frame.

Gore’s fund also holds the following closely-followed stocks:

Amazon.com, Inc AMZN 12 million shares
Intel Corporation INTC 15 million shares
Applied Materials, Inc. AMAT 6.1 million shares
Alibaba Group Holding Ltd - ADR BABA 4.5 million shares
Salesforce Inc CRM 3.3 million shares

Photo: G Holland via Shutterstock