From MarketFolly:

Next up is John Burbank's Passport Capital... Burbank founded the $2 billion San Francisco hedge fund in 2000 and they use macroeconomic and sector analysis to select their investments. After identifying macro themes, they drill down to find individual companies with rigorous fundamental research.

...Passport has a very respectable track record of gaining 27% annually, but like many other funds, hit a rough patch in 2008. They've bounced back quickly in 2009 though as we've detailed below.

By far and away their largest move last quarter was their addition to their gold position via GLD. They boosted it by 6,717% and moved it all the way up to their 2nd largest holding at 7.9% of their overall long portfolio. This is a big move and very notable as it adds yet another prominent hedge fund to the list of those in the gold trade. We now wonder if this is a contrarian signal that it may be time to get out of gold with all of the hedge funds having already rushed in…

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More on other big players crowding the gold trade:

World's top money manager goes waaaay long South African gold

Enormous institutional investor buys $400 million in gold

Another mega hedge fund makes gold largest holding

One of the Crux's favorite investors is buying gold and tech stocks