David Einhorn’s Greenlight Capital more than doubled its stake in a lesser-known company Kyndryl Holdings last quarter, making it his hedge fund’s second biggest technology bet. Greenlight increased its stake in Kyndryl to more than $53 million at the end of June, slightly smaller than its bet on fintech company Global Payments , according to a regulatory filing. The star manager came off a stellar second quarter even as the broader market suffered a brutal sell-off. Einhorn previously said his hedge fund returned 8.4% in that period, marking the best quarter ever in his firm’s history. The S & P 500 dropped 16% during that time. Einhorn told investors he remained cautious in the bear market as he reduced his long equity exposure. The ramped-up bet on Kyndryl could mean that Einhorn has a particularly strong conviction in the tech name even if he remained bearish on the overall market. The New York-based Kyndryl is an information-technology services company that was spun off from IBM last November. Kyndryl used to be a big part of IBM’s global technology services segment, which includes infrastructure service operations such as managing client data centers and traditional information-technology support. Kyndryl chief executive officer Martin Schroeter told Bloomberg last week that his company will be focusing on managing public cloud services owned by Big Tech firms Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet. Still, the company had a slow start since its spinoff. Year over year, Kyndryl’s sales declined 10% to $4.3 billion in the quarter ended in June. Its contract signings also declined 20% compared to the prior year, according to Evercore ISI. Evercore said it expects Kyndryl to return to positive organic revenue growth by 2025. The Wall Street firm has an “in line” rating on the company and a 12-month price target of $18. Shares of Kyndryl have dropped about 40% this year to trade just shy of $11 apiece on Thursday.
