Stanley Druckenmiller — the man who ran 30% annualized returns for three decades without a single losing year — just told the world he’s moved on from AI stocks. And what he’s buying instead should make every trader pay attention.
In a new Morgan Stanley “Hard Lessons” podcast interview published Friday, the Duquesne Family Office chief laid out a portfolio that looks nothing like the AI-mania trades that dominated 2024 and 2025. His current playbook: long copper, long gold, short the U.S. dollar, short Treasury bonds, and a deep dive into biotech. AI, he said, is “no longer playing a starring role.”
The copper trade is arguably his most conviction call. Druckenmiller sees virtually no new supply coming online for the next eight years, while AI data centers are creating massive incremental demand for the metal. Copper is the backbone of electrification — every data center, every EV charging station, every grid upgrade needs it. When supply is locked and demand is exploding, the math writes itself.
On gold, it’s simpler: geopolitics. With U.S.-Iran tensions escalating and central banks hoarding at record pace, Druckenmiller is using gold as portfolio insurance. On the dollar, he’s outright bearish. “Foreigners are way, way overloaded in dollars,” he said. Purchasing power is at the upper end of its historical range, and as trade balances adjust, “the dollar will fall on its own.”
But the most interesting trade might be the one nobody saw coming: Teva Pharmaceutical. Druckenmiller loaded up when the Israeli generics giant was trading at just 6x earnings. The thesis? New CEO Richard Francis was quietly transforming Teva from a boring generics company into a biosimilars and innovative drug growth story — but neither value investors (who hated the growth pivot) nor growth investors (who hadn’t noticed yet) were buying. Druckenmiller got in at $16. The stock is now at $32.
He’s also piling into biotech broadly, noting the sector has been “languishing at its bottom for four years.” As a 30-year board member of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, he sees breakthroughs that the market hasn’t priced in yet.
The bigger message here isn’t about any single trade — it’s about rotation. When the guy with the best track record in hedge fund history tells you he’s leaving the most crowded trade on Earth for hard assets and forgotten pharma stocks, that’s not a suggestion. That’s a signal.