Jim Simons' Renaissance fund dumped Apple and Amazon and boosted its Tesla stake last quarter

* Renaissance Technologies sold its Apple and Amazon stakes and ramped up its Tesla investment last quarter, a regulatory filing shows. * Jim Simons' quantitative hedge fund likely raked in $600 million to $900 million by selling the two tech stocks. * RenTech also raised its Tesla stake by 44% after slashing it by 80% in the first quarter. * Moreover, the fund increased its Zoom position by 160%, making the startup one of its five most valuable holdings. * Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories. --- Renaissance Technologies, one of the largest and most successful hedge funds in history, cashed out its Apple and Amazon stakes and boosted its position in Tesla last quarter, according to a regulatory filing. RenTech, a quantitative hedge fund founded by Cold War codebreaker and MIT math professor Jim Simons, sold its roughly 193,000 Amazon shares and 979,000 Apple shares in the three months to June 30. It probably raked in a total of $600 million to $900 million, based on the two stocks' trading ranges in the period. The sales will fuel concerns that the tech titans, which have skyrocketed in value this year, are overpriced and set to retreat. Read more: Warren Buffett should cut his $110 billion Apple stake, veteran Berkshire Hathaway investor says RenTech, which relies on algorithms to make many of its trading decisions, also lifted its stake in Tesla by 44% to 1.1 million shares. The move is a swift reversal for the fund, given it owned 3.9 million shares in Elon Musk's electric-car company at the end of December 2019, only to sell 80% of them in the first quarter of this year. Even so, Tesla was RenTech's 10th most valuable holding at the end of June, up from its 42nd biggest at the end of March. Its rise up the ranks reflected the share purchases and Tesla's stock price more than doubling last quarter. RenTech's other notable trades included boosting its stake in Zoom Video Communications by about 160% to 7.3 million shares. Those were worth $1.8 billion at the end of June, meaning the video-conferencing platform was the fund's fourth-biggest holding. Read more: Fred Liu's Hayden Capital has returned more than 100% in 2020. He breaks down the simple strategy he used to pinpoint 2 stocks that grew 10 times within just a few years. Overall, RenTech's stock portfolio rose in value by 13% to $116 billion last quarter, after tumbling 22% in the first quarter due to the coronavirus pandemic. Join the conversation about this story » NOW WATCH: Here's what it's like to travel during the coronavirus outbreak
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PayPal parts with top advertising executive after shifting its marketing strategy during the pandemic

* PayPal's chief creative officer Steve Simpson, its top advertising executive, left the company after about a year. * The move came after PayPal shifted its marketing strategy during the coronavirus pandemic, placing less emphasis on the brand and more on catering to small businesses, said a source with direct knowledge of the marketing operation. * Simpson's departure followed that of CMO and former Apple executive Allison Johnson in May. Both "decided to leave PayPal" as the company streamlines its global marketing functions, according to a PayPal spokeswoman. * Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories. PayPal's highest-ranking ad executive Steve Simpson left earlier this month after just over a year as part of a restructuring of its global marketing business. Simpson, who was chief creative officer, was hired to make high-minded ad campaigns to help PayPal stand out from competitors like Square, Stripe, and Apple Pay. But this strategy chan

Neighbor, an Andreessen Horowitz-backed startup that wants to be the Airbnb of self-storage, has started partnering with landlords to turn empty offices into spaces for people's stuff

* The Airbnb of self-storage, Neighbor, has seen a surge in demand as a result of the pandemic, according to CEO and cofounder Joseph Woodbury. * The company announced a partnership Tuesday with landlord and operator Bridgeton Holdings to fill vacant office space with self-storage in San Francisco and eventually across the country. * This comes as the office market has taken a big hit from the coronavirus pandemic. * Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories. The coronavirus has accelerated the trend of using under-utilized real estate for other purposes, like turning retail storefronts and parking lots into distribution hubs for e-commerce fulfillment and redeveloping malls into communities by adding residential units. One area of commercial real estate that's in high demand is self-storage. The average spend on construction of new facilities per year jumped to $5 billion in 2018 from $1 billion in 2015. With the coronavirus prompting moves, a likely trigger f

The machines USPS is removing from distribution centers can sort more than 36,000 pieces of mail per hour. Here's how they work.

* The United States Postal Service has been deactivating mail-sorting machines around the US ahead of the surge expected from mail-in voting this fall, reports say. * Each machine can sort up to 36,000 pieces of mail per hour. * The machines sort letters, postcards, and other mail by bar code. * Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories. Mail-sorting machines used by the United States Postal Service (USPS) have been dismantled and removed from distribution centers around the country, according to postal workers. They told Motherboard that at least 19 machines were removed without explanation. An internal USPS letter from June included a plan to remove hundreds of more mail-sorting machines this year. Postal Workers Union members and some Democratic politicians have expressed concerns about changes to the USPS under Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a major Trump donor who started his position this summer. President Trump has attacked the USPS and claimed that voting

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