PineStone Q4 2025: 43 Names, $16.1B AUM, Compounder Bias

PineStone Asset Management Inc. filed a 43-position 13F for Q4 2025 reporting $16.09 billion in market value — its largest quarter on record by reported value. The Toronto-based franchise is one of the cleanest expressions of the quality-compounder thesis available in 13F data, and Q4 2025 sharpened that profile. The top five holdings cover 45.3% of the book; the top ten cover about 66%. Two trades dominate the quarter: a +15.6% rebalance into Alphabet that lifted its weight by 1.50 percentage points, and a −19.8% cut to AutoZone that took its weight from 7.08% to 5.67%.

That combination — pressing into a hyperscaler while trimming a beloved compounder right after AZO's 2025 run — tells you more about how PineStone underwrites position size than any of the prose in the brand's marketing materials. They are concentrated, but not static. Position discipline is the actual product.

Snapshot

The top of the book splits into three buckets. Hyperscaler / large-cap technology (Taiwan Semiconductor 11.80%, Alphabet 11.18%, Microsoft 8.81%) anchors 31.8% of the portfolio. Financial-data and exchange compounders (Moody's 7.54%, Mastercard 6.02%, CME Group 4.44%, MSCI Inc. 3.57%) account for another 21.6%. Specialty consumer / industrials (AutoZone 5.67%, TJX 4.04%, Sherwin-Williams 3.46%) round out the top tier at 13.2%. There is essentially no energy, no banks, no regulated utilities, no biotech speculation. That's a deliberate exclusion list, not an accident.

Q3 → Q4 Rebalance: The Two Trades That Matter

43 holdings in, 43 holdings out. One name dropped (Adobe at $71M, 0.44%, a non-event clean-up of a small position), 44 names held. The aggregate value rose $1.84 billion (+12.9%) from Q3's $14.24B to Q4's $16.09B — a function of both market beta and re-allocation, not net new capital you can isolate cleanly from a 13F alone.

The two trades that actually move the portfolio's character:

• Alphabet (GOOGL): $1.56B → $1.80B (+15.6% by value, +1.50pp by weight). On a quarter when Alphabet's stock rallied alongside the AI capex tape, PineStone added on top — the position weight grew faster than price action would deliver passively. This is the largest deliberate add of the quarter.
• AutoZone (AZO): $1.14B → $913M (−19.8% by value, −1.41pp by weight). AZO was the top-five resident going into Q4 and exited the quarter at #6. Auto retail aftermarket compounders had a strong year through Q3 2025; PineStone took chips off in the December book.

The smaller adjustments fit a consistent pattern. Moody's (+12.5%, +0.83pp), Mastercard (+7.4%, +0.41pp), MSCI (+5.2%, +0.17pp), and CME (+2.8%, +0.12pp) all received incremental capital — financial-data infrastructure adds across the board. Microsoft (−5.9%, −0.56pp) and Sherwin-Williams (−2.3%, −0.08pp) were trimmed at the margin. The book rebalanced toward Alphabet + financial-data, away from MSFT + AZO + Adobe.

Concentration Curve

The concentration profile is what separates PineStone from a generic large-cap quality fund. Top-1 at 11.80% (TSM) is meaningfully above what an equal-weighted 43-position portfolio would hold (which would be 2.33% per name). Top-5 at 45.3% is the operative concentration figure: nearly half the book lives in five names. A typical institutional active equity fund runs top-5 in the 15-25% range. PineStone runs roughly double that.

For a retail investor reading a 13F, the practical interpretation is that the marginal price of every quarter's filing comes overwhelmingly from how the top-5 moved. If TSM, Alphabet, MSFT, Moody's, and Mastercard collectively reprice 5%, the entire book moves ~225 basis points regardless of what the other 38 names do. That's the trade-off concentrated managers accept in exchange for genuinely conviction-sized positions.

AUM Trajectory

PineStone's reported 13F value has grown from $533M in 2022Q4 to $16.09B in 2025Q4 — a roughly 30x expansion across 13 quarters. The shape isn't a smooth curve. There's a sharp jump from 2023Q2's $2.07B to 2023Q3's $6.93B (initial scale-up of the institutional book), a near-doubling from 2024Q1's $6.29B to 2024Q2's $14.19B, then steadier growth from 2024Q3 onward. The position count stabilized around 43–45 from 2023Q3 forward — they found the book size early and have not drifted from it.

For context, this trajectory is unusual. Most growing managers add positions as they add capital. PineStone added capital while keeping the position count constant, which means each compounded position got bigger. That is the operational signature of a manager who believes their existing thesis set is the right one and refuses to dilute it with new ideas. Whether you find that admirable discipline or risky overconfidence depends on your priors — the data simply records the pattern.

What To Watch In Q1 2026

The Q1 2026 cycle (which we now have visibility into separately) will tell you whether the GOOGL-up / AZO-down rebalance was the start of a sustained rotation or a one-quarter rebalance. Two specific tells: (1) does Alphabet hold above 10% weight, or does it normalize back toward 9%; (2) does AutoZone sit at 5.67% or continue lower toward 4-5%. The shape of the financial-data complex (Moody's + MSCI + CME) is the secondary tell — if those three keep absorbing capital relative to the hyperscalers, PineStone is communicating a defensive posture against a richening AI tape.

For comparison anchors on the active-quality cohort, see our coverage of other research filers and the broader institutional signal feed for new 13D/G and Form 4 events on PineStone's named tickers. The full filing is on EDGAR under accession history searchable from PineStone's SEC company page.