Elliott’s 13F for 30 June carries a $1.43bn put on the software ETF, in the quarter its partner Jesse Cohn joined the Synopsys board. Synopsys sits inside that ETF, and Elliott’s stake barely registers on the 13F. I dated each of Elliott’s sector puts against the campaigns it has made public. They cluster in the quarters the campaigns went public, and the software line points at Synopsys.
The claim: Elliott’s sector puts tend to arrive with its activist campaigns and sit on the funds that hold its targets, so its June book is long Synopsys with the software sector hedged.
The stake: Since the 30 June report date Synopsys has slipped 4.6% while the software ETF rose 17%, which leaves Elliott’s campaign stock back near the price at which its stake surfaced in March.
The catalyst: Elliott’s 13F for 30 September, due by 16 November 2026, shows whether the software hedge survived a quarter in which the pair lost 18%.
Wrong if: an 8-K reports Jesse Cohn leaving the Synopsys board, or Elliott’s November 13F shows neither a software put nor any Synopsys shares.
Coverage reads Elliott’s puts as bets or skips them
The consensus treats Elliott’s puts as bets or leaves them out. A Benzinga headline in August 2025 had Elliott betting against the S&P 500, the Nasdaq 100 and Nvidia. In July, 24/7 Wall St listed Paul Singer’s top picks as five longs and skipped the puts entirely.
In August I showed that Schonfeld’s put lines ran 60, 3 and 129 across three consecutive filings, with no rule requiring a reported book to be continuous. Elliott’s put lines persist from filing to filing, and what moves them is outside the filing: its campaigns.
Take the new software line. Elliott’s put on the iShares Expanded Tech-Software Sector ETF, IGV, was absent at 31 March and covered 15,750,000 shares at 30 June, more than six times any earlier software put it filed. In between, Synopsys signed a cooperation agreement putting Cohn on its board from 1 June. The fund’s own schedule for 30 June holds $434.0m of Synopsys. Elliott’s own 13F lists 227,500 Synopsys shares worth $101m, against a stake the Wall Street Journal reported on 22 March as worth billions. The rest is exposure the form does not carry.
A 13F put is priced at the stock
A 13F put line is the stock under the option, shares multiplied by the close at quarter end. The SEC’s Form 13F guidance sets the rest: the form reports long positions in listed US securities at quarter end, filed up to 45 days later. A manager lists only the options it holds, never the ones it writes, and for an option the columns describe the underlying stock.
Elliott’s software line shows the arithmetic. Its 15,750,000 shares at IGV’s 30 June close of $90.60 make exactly the $1,426,950,000 in the filing, the stock behind 157,500 contracts. I checked every put line in the June filing the same way, and each equals its shares times that day’s close. The strikes, the expiries and the premium are nowhere in the document.
Some of the lines are large against the funds themselves. The IGV put covers 10.6% of IGV’s $13.43bn of net assets at 30 June. Its put on IHI, the medical devices fund, covers 20.4% of that fund’s $3.02bn, beside a call on 1,400,000 IHI shares.
The form also leaves out the stake itself. Elliott’s Form ADV brochure describes its hedged strategies as ones in which a long position in one asset is associated with a short position in a different one. When the long is an activist stake held largely as economic exposure, which a 13F does not report, the filing shows the short leg and hides the long.
PepsiCo shows the order of operations. Elliott’s filing for 30 June 2025 was amended in November, when confidential treatment expired, to add puts on 4,000,000 PepsiCo shares worth $528m. Elliott disclosed its $4bn stake on 2 September, two months after a quarter end at which it already held puts on the stock.
The reason to hedge the sector is the length of a campaign. A board seat, a strategic review or a breakup takes quarters to land, and the target can fall with its sector in the meantime. Selling the stake would give up the votes the campaign needs, so a put on the fund that holds the target covers the sector’s move and leaves the stake whole.
That leaves one thing to test. When Elliott makes a campaign public, does a put appear or grow on the fund that holds the target in the same quarter?
Whether to own Synopsys against the software ETF into Elliott’s 16 November 13F, and at what size, rests on the campaign timing table.
Below the paid line:
Sixteen Elliott campaigns dated against the quarter a put appeared on a fund holding each target, with the base rate
The weight of each target inside its fund, from nine N-PORT schedules
Fifteen filings of Elliott’s put book, and the one campaign sector it leaves bare
The position: entry, payoff and kill levels, staged sizing, and the November test
