IMC-Chicago, the US subsidiary of Dutch investment firm IMC, sharply reduced its exposure to Chinese EV maker Nio in the second quarter of 2025, slashing its common stock position and scaling back bullish options bets, a regulatory filing showed.
As of the end of June, the firm held 644,280 Nio shares valued at $2.21 million — down 58.1% from the 1.54 million shares reported at the end of the first quarter.
The stake is currently worth about $3.33 million after Nio shares jumped more than 10% on Tuesday and gained 49% over the past month.
IMC also trimmed its call option holdings on Nio by 18.5% to 5.29 million contracts, with the value dropping 26.6% to $18.1 million.
The firm’s bearish exposure remained largely unchanged, with put options down just 3.8% to 4.1 million contracts valued at $14 million.
IMC first invested in Nio in mid-2019, less than a year after the EV maker went public.
It re-entered the stock in late 2024 with a purchase of 1.86 million shares after fully exiting the position earlier that year, filings show. Its Nio holdings peaked at 2.84 million shares in Q1 2024 before gradually declining.
Nio shares surged by about 5,000% between late 2019 and early 2021, when it reached a new all-time high of $66.99 per share — months before expanding to Norway, its first international market.
Institutional ownership has declined sharply following the stock price movement in the last few yeards.
Since mid-2022, the number of Nio shares held by institutional investors has dropped more than 61%. As of Monday, 470 institutional investors held a combined 230.6 million shares.
IMC Chicago, which opened in 2000 as the firm’s first international office, is now the company’s largest global location.
Earlier this week, Texas-based Kingstone Capital Partners disclosed a new stake in Nio, reporting ownership of 3.59 million shares worth more than $12.3 million at the end of Q2.
As of the end of the first quarter, UBS was the largest institutional holder, with nearly 75 million shares, followed by Morgan Stanley (20.8 million) and Wolverine Asset Management (19.2 million).
Last week, insurance registrations of the Nio group — which includes the Nio, Onvo, and Firefly brands — rose 19.5% to 4,900 units, from the 4,100 units recorded in the second week of July.
The company aims to double its annual sales in 2025 and counts with both recently launched sub-brands to achieve over 440,000 vehicles delivered.
