The year after Cercano Management was spun out of the family office of Microsoft Corp. co-founder Paul Allen in late 2021, its U.S. stock portfolio had a 17% weighting to the software giant.
Heading into 2025, that position is down to about 12%, after the firm cut its stake each quarter last year, selling a total of at least 275,000 shares of the software maker that Bill Gates and Allen founded 50 years ago. It’s an indication of how Cercano, formerly known as Vulcan Capital, is now positioning itself as a standalone multifamily office catering to the world’s superrich.
Cercano, led by former Vulcan Capital Chief Investment Officer Chris Orndorff, still oversees investment assets for the estate and family foundation of Allen, who died in 2018. Clients typically need at least $250 million to establish an account at the firm, which manages allocations in areas including public markets, private equity and fixed income, regulatory filings show.
With a portfolio of more than 180 U.S. stocks at the end of last year worth almost $4 billion, Cercano shifted toward other so-called Magnificent Seven stocks as it shed some of its Microsoft holdings. The Bellevue, Washington-based firm increased stakes in Apple Inc., Meta Platforms Inc. and Google parent Alphabet Inc. during the three months through Dec. 31.
Still, Microsoft remained its biggest overall U.S. stock holding, with 1.1 million shares valued at roughly $462.5 million, the filings show.
A representative for Cercano, which manages about $10.5 billion of assets on behalf of ultra-high-net-worth individuals and families, declined to comment.
Shares of the Magnificent Seven companies collectively rose almost 70% last year amid investor appetite for companies exposed to artificial intelligence. Microsoft was the laggard of the group, gaining 12% through Dec. 31.
Chinese AI startup DeepSeek — claiming higher AI performance at a lower cost than its Western competitors — has since slowed the Magnificent Seven’s stock rise. That’s especially the case for Nvidia Corp., the Silicon Valley chipmaker that became AI computing’s posterchild in recent years and saw an almost 900% gain in its stock price from the start of 2023 through late January.
Cercano increased its Nvidia stake in early 2024 before trimming it in the final three months. Some other investment firms for the world’s rich — including family offices for Sweden’s Rausing dynasty — boosted their holdings during the period, potentially putting them in line to take a hit from the DeepSeek-induced selloff.