Goldman’s block-trade spree makes Wall St. jittery

Large block trades on Friday causing a wave of selling in a clutch of companies were driven by sales of more than $10 billion executed by Goldman Sachs Group Inc, media reported on Saturday.

Shares in ViacomCBS and Discovery tumbled around 27% each on Friday, while U.S.-listed shares of China-based Baidu and Tencent Music plunged during the week, dropping as much as 33.5% and 48.5%, respectively, from Tuesday’s closing levels.

As Wall Street speculated on the identity of the mysterious seller behind the massive $10.5 billion in block trades executed on Friday by Goldman Sachs Group Inc., investors also pondered just how unprecedented the selloff was — and whether there’s more to come.

The sales lit up trader chat rooms from New York to Hong Kong and were part of an extraordinary spree that erased $35 billion from the values of bellwether stocks ranging from Chinese technology giants to U.S. media conglomerates.

Goldman sold $6.6 billion worth of shares of Baidu Inc., Tencent Music Entertainment Group, and Vipshop Holdings Ltd. before the market opened in the U.S., according to reports. That move was followed by the sale of $3.9 billion of shares in ViacomCBS Inc., Discovery Inc., Farfetch Ltd., iQiyi Inc., and GSX Techedu Inc.

Block trades — the sale of a large chunk of stock at a price sometimes negotiated outside of the market — are common, but the size of these trades and the multiple blocks hitting the market during the normal trading hours aren’t.

“This was highly unusual,” said Oliver Pursche, a senior vice president at Wealthspire Advisors, which manages $12 billion in assets. “The question now is: Are they done? Is this over? Or come Monday and Tuesday, are markets are going to be hit by another wave of block trades?”

The trades triggered price swings for every stock involved in the high-volume transactions, rattling traders and prompting talk that a hedge fund or family office was in trouble and being forced to sell.

The situation is worrisome “because we don’t have all the answers on whether this was the liquidation of just one fund or more than a fund, or whether it was a fund liquidation, to begin with, and the reason behind it,” Pursche said.

Meanwhile, on the political front, U.S. President Biden on Friday said that Vladimir Putin of Russia and Xi Jinping of China are invited to the global leaders’ climate summit the administration is hosting in April.

The president told reporters that he hasn’t directly invited Putin or Xi but said the leaders “know they’re invited” to the summit, an event the U.S. is hosting to advance global efforts to reduce climate-changing fossil fuel emissions.

The administration plans to unveil a new carbon emissions target at the summit, which will be held remotely on April 22 and 23.