T. Boone Pickens' hedge fund sells all its Chesapeake Energy stock

T. Boone Pickens, the billionaire Texas hedge-fund manager, sold almost half a million shares in Chesapeake Energy during the past six weeks, as the stock fell 24 percent on investor reaction to natural-gas prices and potential management conflicts.
Pickens' BP Capital Management sold 71,000 shares, or 12 percent of its stake in Chesapeake, in the first three months of the year, according to a filing Wednesday with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The remaining stake, 499,055 shares, was sold by May 10, when Pickens said he no longer owned Chesapeake, once the third-largest of BP Capital's U.S. equity holdings.
"We got out of the natural-gas stocks, and Chesapeake was one of them," he said Thursday on CNBC.
Pickens, below, who has called Chesapeake chief executive Aubrey McClendon a friend, said the company will survive.
"Aubrey's a visionary," he said. "He gets out over his skis sometimes, but don't bet against Aubrey."
Jay Rosser, a spokesman for Pickens, declined to comment on the fund's holdings in an e-mail. Pickens said May 10 he was exiting Chesapeake "not out of concern about the company but amid general concerns about how the natural-gas sector was faring," Rosser said in the e-mail.
Bloomberg News