Seth Klarman's Baupost Group Doubles Down on Amazon — What the Value Legend's Q1 2026 13F Reveals

Seth Klarman doesn't file often, and he files even less loudly. Baupost Group's 13F portfolios rarely top 25 names, which is exactly why any single move gets outsized attention. The Q1 2026 filing, covering positions as of March 31, shows a fund that just made one of its most concentrated bets in years — and quietly walked away from several long-held names in the process.

The headline: Amazon becomes a core position

Baupost increased its Amazon stake by nearly 47% in Q1, adding close to a million shares and pushing the position to roughly $649 million, or about 12.7% of the entire disclosed portfolio. That follows an even larger move the quarter before, when Baupost effectively doubled its Amazon shares as the stock lagged the broader market through late 2025.

The thesis lines up with classic Klarman value investing, not momentum chasing. AWS revenue hit $35.58 billion last quarter, growing 24% year-over-year — the fastest pace in over three years — while the segment's contracted backlog has swelled to roughly $464 billion. Klarman built the position while Amazon traded at a discount to the broader market despite AI-driven cloud demand accelerating, then added more once the fundamentals started confirming the thesis. It's a pattern worth watching for on InvestorLens's own investor pages: funds buying into strength after building a position on weakness tend to have done real diligence, not just chased a headline.

What else Baupost bought

Six brand-new positions entered the portfolio this quarter: Aon, Norwegian Cruise Line, NOW Inc., Teleflex, Vaxcyte, and Visa. That's a notably diverse basket for a fund known for concentration — insurance brokerage, travel and leisure, energy equipment, medical devices, biotech, and payments infrastructure all showing up in the same 13-week window. None of the new positions appear large enough individually to be a top-five holding yet, which suggests Klarman is still building rather than committing full size. Norwegian Cruise Line in particular stands out: a beaten-down, highly levered post-pandemic recovery story is a textbook Baupost setup — cheap, out of favor, and with a clear catalyst path if leisure travel demand holds up.

What Baupost sold

The reductions are just as telling as the additions. Willis Towers Watson was cut by roughly 34%, and Liberty Global by nearly 36%. Baupost fully exited Fiserv, Fidelity National Information Services (FIS), and Dollar General, while trimming Eagle Materials by close to 25%.

The Fiserv and FIS exits are worth sitting with. Both are payments-processing infrastructure names that Baupost has held through prior cycles, and dropping both in the same quarter — while simultaneously adding Visa — reads less like an exit from the payments sector and more like a rotation within it, from processors toward the network itself. That kind of swap is easy to miss if you only look at gross buying and selling activity rather than the sector-level picture, which is exactly the kind of pattern InvestorLens's overlap tool is built to surface across multiple filers at once.

The portfolio shape that emerges

After this quarter's activity, Baupost's top five holdings are Amazon (12.70%), Restaurant Brands International (11.67%), Wesco International (7.69%), Union Pacific (7.31%), and Anthem (7.30%). That's a portfolio with real sector spread — e-commerce and cloud infrastructure, quick-service restaurants, industrial distribution, rail transport, and health insurance — but with more than 46% of assets concentrated in just those five names. For a 22-holding portfolio, that's Klarman's usual style: broad enough to avoid single-name catastrophe, concentrated enough that conviction actually matters.

Twenty-five total changes across a 22-position book in a single quarter is a high turnover rate for Baupost historically, which tends to hold core positions for years. It's a signal that Klarman sees more dispersion in current valuations than usual — some names cheap enough to add aggressively, others (payments processors, a discount retailer, cable infrastructure) no longer offering the margin of safety he requires.

Reading this alongside the rest of 13F season

Baupost's Amazon conviction shows up alongside a broader theme running through Q1 2026 filings: multiple large funds have been rotating into AI-infrastructure beneficiaries even where the "AI stock" label doesn't obviously apply. Amazon's AWS backlog, not its retail business, is what's driving Klarman's sizing here — a distinction that's easy to lose in headline coverage. For a broader read on how institutional positioning is shifting heading into the second half of 2026, InvestorLens's macro consensus page aggregates signal across dozens of filers rather than relying on any single fund's quarterly snapshot.

As always with 13F data, there's a built-in lag — these are March 31 positions disclosed in mid-May, so Baupost's actual current book may already look different. But the direction of travel — toward cloud infrastructure and network-level payments exposure, away from processors and discount retail — is a clean enough signal to be worth tracking as Q2 filings start arriving in mid-August.

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Data sourced from public SEC 13F filings. Educational research only — not investment advice.