Armistice Capital put $75 million into four new stocks during the second quarter: a genomics sequencer, an analytical-instrument maker, a medical device manufacturer and a Danish drugmaker. Combined, the four positions equal less than 1% of the $8.17 billion Armistice Capital reported managing as of June 30, according to fund-tracking data compiled by StockZoa.
New Names in Diagnostics and Instrumentation
The largest of the four, a $28 million stake in Waters Corp., came to 75,000 shares bought at an average price of $375.04, the StockZoa data show. Waters makes chromatography systems, mass spectrometry instruments and laboratory software used by pharmaceutical manufacturers, food and beverage companies and clinical diagnostics labs, and it has operated out of Framingham, Massachusetts, since Jim Waters founded it in 1958, according to the company’s own description of its business.
The Waters that Armistice bought into is not the same company that carried that name a year earlier. Waters and Becton, Dickinson and Company agreed in July 2025 to combine BD’s biosciences and diagnostics units with Waters, a $17.5 billion deal that closed Feb. 9, 2026, leaving Waters shareholders with 60.8% of the merged company and BD shareholders with the rest, according to a trade-press account of the closing timeline. The combined firm now runs four divisions, analytical sciences, biosciences, advanced diagnostics and materials sciences, and employs about 16,000 people, Waters said when the deal closed.
Armistice also opened a $16 million position in Illumina, 91,000 shares at $175.83 apiece. Illumina builds the DNA sequencing and array-based genomics platforms used in oncology research, genetic disease studies and infectious disease surveillance from its base in San Diego, the company says of itself. On May 28, 2026, the company introduced a distributed whole-genome sequencing product built to detect molecular residual disease during and after cancer treatment, with analytical sensitivity down to 10 parts per million and a workflow it says can finish in as few as five days, Illumina said in announcing the launch. A separate $16 million stake went into Integer Holdings, 168,000 shares at $93.45, a company that describes itself as one of the largest medical device contract manufacturers in the world, serving the cardio and vascular, neuromodulation and cardiac rhythm management markets, Integer says.
The fourth new name, a $15 million stake in Novo Nordisk built from 312,000 shares at $47.94, arrived six months after the Food and Drug Administration approved the company’s Wegovy pill on Dec. 22, 2025, the first oral GLP-1 medicine cleared for weight loss in the United States. Patients who stayed on the drug for the full 64-week trial lost an average of 16.6% of body weight, compared with 2.7% on placebo, and 76% of treated patients lost at least 5% of body weight versus 31% on placebo, Novo Nordisk said in its approval announcement. About 3.2 million people in the U.S. had already been prescribed a Wegovy product by the time of that announcement, the company said.
Steven Boyd founded Armistice in 2012, according to Crunchbase, and the fund built its reputation on concentrated, sub-10% stakes in small drug developers tied to a single binary catalyst, a Food and Drug Administration decision or a clinical trial readout. Waters, Illumina, Integer Holdings and Novo Nordisk sit outside that pattern. All four are established, revenue-generating companies with market capitalizations well above the microcap range, and none of the four positions comes close to a controlling or even influential stake.
A Fifth Position Nearly Quintuples
None of the four new stakes moved as sharply in percentage terms as an existing one did. Armistice’s position in Airbnb grew 391% during the quarter, ending June at $11 million across 75,000 shares priced at $143.10, the same StockZoa tracking shows.
Airbnb has no connection to health care, diagnostics or pharmaceuticals, and the position remains small next to the fund’s total book. The percentage swing, though, outpaced every other move Armistice made in the quarter, new stake or old.
Most of the Book Still Sits in Two ETFs
Set against $75 million in new stakes and an $11 million swing in a fifth, the numbers dominating Armistice’s disclosure have nothing to do with any single company. Put options on the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust accounted for 29.2% of the reported portfolio, worth about $2.4 billion, and put options on the iShares Russell 2000 ETF added another 21.3%, worth roughly $1.7 billion, the StockZoa data show. The two positions combined made up more than half of everything Armistice reported owning as of June 30, a structure the fund itself describes as long/short and value-oriented.
Cytokinetics, Agios Pharmaceuticals and Madrigal Pharmaceuticals came next, at 2.8%, 2.4% and 1.9% of the portfolio, worth $233 million, $193 million and $155 million, respectively. Every other position, including the four new stakes described above, falls below that. Armistice launched 169 new positions in total during the quarter and was a net buyer of $1.4 billion in stock, the same data show, a volume of turnover that dwarfs any single name in the book.
Two Different Kinds of Disclosure
The Waters, Illumina, Integer Holdings and Novo Nordisk stakes surfaced through a different filing than the sub-10% biotech positions typically associated with Armistice. Form 13F is triggered by managing $100 million or more in qualifying securities and requires a quarterly accounting of a manager’s entire U.S.-listed equity book, whatever the size of any single holding. Schedule 13G, by contrast, is triggered only when a passive investor crosses 5% ownership of a specific company’s shares, and it discloses a single position rather than a full portfolio, according to an explainer of the two filing types.
A $16 million stake in a company the size of Illumina falls nowhere near 5% ownership and would never trigger a 13G. It shows up only because Form 13F has no ownership floor at all, just an asset-under-management threshold for the filer.
That distinction matters for reading the two data sets side by side. The 13G filings that have drawn attention to Armistice’s biotech positioning capture only the stakes large enough, relative to a small company’s float, to cross 5%. The 13F captures everything else, including positions in companies too large for any realistic Armistice stake to reach that threshold.
A Wider Pattern Among Event-Driven Funds
Armistice’s quarter fit a broader pattern of portfolio churn among funds that trade around corporate events rather than holding static positions. Legion Partners’ 13F portfolio fell 71% during the quarter, to $40.6 million, while Elliott Investment Management’s grew 12.7%, to about $22.7 billion, and Farallon Capital Management’s rose almost 25%, according to an analysis of second-quarter activist filings by Diligent. That analysis grouped funds by sector focus, citing Kimmeridge’s concentration in energy and Land & Buildings’ in real estate alongside Armistice’s health care orientation, and it named the Waters Corp. purchase specifically as one of the quarter’s notable new positions among the funds it tracked.
Elliott and Pershing Square Capital Management both made sizable moves into mega-cap stocks during the same period, the analysis found, a large-cap counterpart to the small, targeted stakes Armistice added. The pattern those numbers describe is not consolidation around fewer, larger bets. It is the opposite: managers adding and dropping dozens of positions each quarter while a small number of core holdings, an ETF options structure for Armistice, a mega-cap stock for Elliott, carry most of the reported value. The $75 million Armistice spent on Waters, Illumina, Integer Holdings and Novo Nordisk combined is a fraction of the $17.5 billion Waters and BD needed to complete their own merger five months earlier, a reminder that the fund’s new stakes buy exposure to a much larger set of corporate decisions than its dollar amounts alone would suggest.
The Fund Behind the Filings
Boyd’s path to founding Armistice ran through McKinsey & Company and SAB Capital Management as an analyst, York Capital as an associate covering consumer and health care names, and Senator Investment Group as a senior research analyst, according to fund-tracking data on file with Insider Monkey. The firm now operates from an office on Madison Avenue in Manhattan, a business listing for Armistice Capital South LLC at that address shows.
That history produced a quarter with two distinct faces. One is the familiar pattern of sub-10% biotech stakes tied to specific catalysts, disclosed through Schedule 13G filings as they cross the ownership threshold. The other, visible only in the Form 13F, is $75 million spread across four established diagnostics, instrumentation and pharmaceutical names, an Airbnb position that grew nearly fivefold, and a book still built primarily on two index-option positions worth more than $4 billion between them. Whether any of the four new names becomes a larger commitment, or joins the long list of positions Armistice opens and closes within a filing cycle or two, is not something the June 30 disclosure addresses.
