When this column tipped £8.7bn US equities fund Pershing Square Holdings in August 2022, we hailed fund manager Bill Ackman’s conversion from “Wall Street buccaneer to Warren Buffett”, the legendary value investor at Berkshire Hathaway. After a disastrous investment in Valeant Pharmaceuticals and a failed activist campaign against nutritional supplements company Herbalife in 2018, New York-based Ackman went back to basics, refocusing his energies on researching and picking cheap, high quality growth stocks for the London-listed investment company. At the time the turnaround had worked wonders, returning 129pc and restoring the losses when we first recommended Pershing Square in May 2017. We were particularly impressed by his use of derivatives to protect investors from losses in the 2020 Covid crash and the subsequent surge in inflation. Nearly two years on, we are pleased to see the shares have risen 57pc and the fund is the top performer in its North America sector with a 225pc total shareholder return over five years that has trounced the 108.6pc return from the US stock market. Recently this impressive investment performance has been bolstered by a second transformation by the star fund manager. Ackman has become a social media phenomenon in the past nine...