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It is one of the least-understood companies ever to gain admission to the FTSE 100.

But, as of 21 December, Pershing Square Holdings (PSH) will be a member of the index.

That will compel the index funds which seek to replicate the Footsie's performance, managing the savings of millions of Britons, to buy shares in this company.

It is an eyebrow-raising promotion that again goes to disprove the commonly held misconception that the FTSE 100 is a barometer for the health of corporate Britain.

For Pershing Square, which is effectively a hedge fund, has very little to do with the UK at all.

It did not even have a listing on the London Stock Exchange until 2017.

That was the year Bill Ackman, one of Wall Street's most famous hedge fund managers, decided PSH should seek a premium listing in order to improve liquidity in its shares - which were already listed on the Amsterdam stock exchange.

So what will all these forced buyers of PSH be getting for their money?

Essentially, access to the investment ideas of Mr Ackman, America's 391st-richest person.

He is a man who polarises opinions and who attracts both devotion and suspicion. He is also seldom far away from the headlines, not least with his property deals, including one in 2013 that saw him and some friends pay $91.5m for a 13,500 square foot apartment on what is described in Manhattan as Billionaire's Row. He called it the "Mona Lisa of apartments" but said it had been "bought for fun".

Mr Ackman's personal life has also been well-documented.

His second wife is Neri Oxman, a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who was briefly linked in the gossip columns with the actor Brad Pitt until it turned out she was dating Mr Ackman all along. She gave birth to the couple's daughter last year.

PSH's arrival in the Footsie also marks the latest twist in a dramatic turn of fortunes for Mr Ackman.

A couple of years ago, Mr Ackman's professional reputation was in shreds, following several years of underperformance that saw Pershing Square Capital Management's assets under management fall from more than $20bn in July 2015 to $8.2bn by March 2018.

He suffered a wave of redemptions after two bets went spectacularly wrong.

The first was a trade that shares of a drug-maker called Valeant would go up. In fact, they fell, costing Mr Ackman's firm reported losses of $4bn.

The second was an aggressive $1bn trade, first taken out in 2012, that shares of Herbalife, a Los Angeles-based nutritional supplements maker, would fall.

Mr Ackman argued that the company was a pyramid scheme. Unfortunately, the shares proceeded to double in price, leaving Mr Ackman with heavy losses. His trade against the company created moments of high drama, not least in 2013, when he clashed with rival billionaire Carl Icahn, the feared corporate raider, who was the biggest shareholder in Herbalife.

The pair duked it out, live, on CNBC in a half-hour argument in which Mr Icahn called his younger rival a "crybaby" and told him: "I wouldn't invest with you if you were the last man on Earth."

They eventually made their peace and Mr Ackman closed the trade in March 2018.

Those setbacks would have ended the careers of many fund managers, but this year, Mr Ackman's fortunes have taken a spectacular turn for the better.

They did so with an astute trade in March, just as stock markets everywhere were collapsing due to concerns over coronavirus, that there would be a rally.

According to Barron's, the influential weekly investment newspaper, the $27m bet placed by Mr Ackman generated him and his investors a total of $3.6bn. It means that, from the start of the year to the end of November, the value of PSH's investments rose by 62.8%.

Shares of PSH have risen by 115% since 23 March, the day the UK went into lockdown, taking the fund to a stock market of £4.83bn and paving the way for it to join the Footsie.

Apart from its trade in the credit default swap markets that have proved so profitable, other key investments to have paid off this year include ones in Lowes, the US retailer; Chipotle Mexican Grill, the restaurant chain and Starbucks, the coffee bar chain. The fund also has exposure to Pershing Square Tontine Holdings, one of the special purpose acquisition companies that have flourished this year.

Despite the gains seen this year in shares of PSH, the fund still trades at a discount to its net asset value (the amount that could be realised today if the fund was closed and all its assets sold off) of nearly 24%.

That implies a dislike among investors for the fund and a level of mistrust that dates back to Mr Ackman's poor run between 2015 and 2017. Mr Ackman himself has said publicly that he hopes promotion to the Footsie will help narrow the discount as index trackers are obliged to buy PSH shares.

And yet, despite this year's spectacular performance, some investors may remain uneasy at having exposure to this business. Another reason for the discount to net asset value, it has been suggested, is the 1.5% management fee and 16% incentive fee extracted by Mr Ackman's management company. These are high fees to be paying an investment manager in this day and age.

Others, still, raise an eyebrow to the comments made by Mr Ackman at the height of the market turbulence, on 18 March, in which he told CNBC viewers that "hell is coming" even though he later profited from the dramatic rally in shares. Mr Ackman has since insisted his comments were "somewhat emotional" but has denied they were aimed at seeking to drive down the market so he could profit from the hedges he had taken out.

But it is impossible not to escape this conclusion: investors often assume that, by buying a FTSE-100 tracker fund, they are getting exposure to a safe and solid investment. They may be surprised to learn that a portion of that investment is being targeted into something so racy.