Hedge Funds and other institutional investors have just submitted their 13Fs to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which announced their equity portfolios by the end of September. At Insider Monkey, we track nearly 900 active hedge funds and significant investors, and by analyzing their 13F files, we can determine the stocks on which they are collectively bullish. One of their choices is Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL), so let’s look at the sentiment surrounding it in the current quarter.
Is Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) a wonderful investment at the moment? The smart money has become strong. The number of long-term hedge fund positions has risen by 12 recently. Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) was in 146 hedge fund portfolios at the end of December. The highest score for this statistic is 152. Our calculations have also shown that AAPL ranks 10th among the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds (click for Q4 rankings). There were 134 hedge funds in our database of AAPL positions at the end of the third quarter.
Bart Baum of Ionic Capital Management
At Insider Monkey, we leave no stone unturned when looking for the next great investment idea. The CBD market, for example, is growing at an annualized rate of 33%, so we take a closer look hemp stock under the radar. We go through lists like the 10 best biotechnology stocks under $ 10 to identify the next stock with 10x upside potential. Although we recommend positions in only a small fraction of the companies we analyze, we look at as many stocks as possible. We read investment letters from hedge funds and listen to stocks at hedge fund conferences. You can subscribe to our free daily newsletter on our website. Let’s now about the new hedge fund action that Apple Inc. include (NASDAQ: AAPL).
Do Hedge Funds think AAPL is a good stock to buy now?
At the end of the fourth quarter, 146 of the hedge funds followed by Insider Monkey were long this share, a change of 9% compared to the third quarter of 2020. Below you can see the change in the hedge fund sentiment towards AAPL last 22 quarters. So let’s look at which hedge funds were among the top holders of the stock and which hedge funds moved big.
The largest stake in Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) was held by Berkshire Hathaway, which owns $ 117714 million worth of shares at the end of December. This was followed by Fisher Asset Management with a position of $ 8130.6 million. Other investors in the company included Millennium Management, Adage Capital Management and AQR Capital Management. In terms of the portfolio weights assigned to each position, Berkshire Hathaway has the largest weight to Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL), about 43.61% of its 13F portfolio. Element Capital Management is also relatively very bullish on the stock, citing 22.08 percent of its 13F equity portfolio to AAPL.
As interest in the industry grew, key money executives first joined Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) jumped. OZ Management, managed by Daniel S. Och, holds the most extraordinary position in Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) begins. OZ Management invested $ 301.9 million in the company at the end of the quarter. Jeff Capital Talpins’ Element Capital Management also made a $ 211.4 million investment in the stock during the quarter. The other funds with new positions in the shares are Chris Rokos’ Rokos Capital Management, Dmitry Balyasny’s Balyasny Asset Management and Lei Zhang’s Hillhouse Capital Management.
Let’s now look at the activity of hedge funds in other stocks such as Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL). We are going to look at Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT), Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN), Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ: GOOGL), Facebook Inc (NASDAQ: FB), Tesla Inc. (NASDAQ: TSLA), Alibaba Group Holding Limited (NYSE: BABA), and Taiwan Semiconductor Mfg. Co. Ltd. (NYSE: TSM). This group of stock markets looks like AAPL’s market capitalization.
[table] Ticker, number of HFs with positions, total value of HF positions (x1000), change in HF position MSFT, 258,52899029,24 AMZN, 273,51531301,28 GOOGL, 179,21902583,17 FB, 242,38233910,12 TSLA, 68,12308025,1 BABA, 156,17892090, -10 TSM, 72,11843403,5 Average, 178,3,29515763,11 [/table]
Check out the table here if you are experiencing formatting issues.
As you can see, these stocks had an average of 178.3 hedge funds with positive positions and the average amount invested in these stocks was $ 29516 million. In AAPL’s case, it was $ 141,811 million. Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) is the most popular stock in this table. On the other hand, Tesla Inc. (NASDAQ: TSLA) the least popular with only 68 bullish hedge fund positions. Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) is not the most popular stock in this group, but the importance of hedge funds is still below average. Our overall sentiment score of the hedge fund for AAPL is 68.8. Stocks with a larger number of hedge fund positions relative to other stocks, as well as their historical range, receive a higher sentiment score. This is a slightly negative signal and we are rather spending our time researching stocks on which hedge funds accumulate. Our calculations showed that the top 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds returned 81.2% in 2019 and 2020, surpassing the S&P 500 ETF (SPY) by 26 percentage points. These shares rose by 12.3% in 2021 to April 19, again surpassing the market by 0.9 percentage points. Unfortunately, AAPL was not nearly as successful as these 30 stocks. AAPL investors were disappointed because the stock had returned 1.8% since the end of December (until 19/19) and underperformed the market. If you are interested in investing in large-cap stocks with great upside potential, you should visit the more diversified list of the top 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds, as most of these stocks have performed better since the beginning of 2020 than the market.
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Disclosure: None. This article was originally published by Insider Monkey.
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