Billionaire Ken Fisher is one of the 800+ fund managers actively tracked by Insider Monkey. A few months ago we asked the question whether Ken Fisher is a “legendary investor or a marketing genius”. One thing is certain that Ken Fisher isn’t an investor who tries to time the market. As the stocks fell all over the world during the first quarter, Ken Fisher’s 13F portfolio also fell from $99 billion to $80 billion. We assume that most of this decline was due to the losses in stock prices rather than investor redemptions.
Wall Street analysts and investors don’t respect Ken Fisher much. We have never heard of Ken Fisher’s stock pitches move stocks the way Bill Ackman or David Tepper moves the markets. Nevertheless Ken Fisher has been able to deliver decent returns to grow his fund’s AUM to nearly $100 billion. That’s nothing to sneeze at.
Ken Fisher of Fisher Asset Management
In this article we are going to take a look at Ken Fisher’s top 10 stock picks. Ken Fisher’s all 10 stock picks outperformed the S&P 500 Index so far in 2020. During the first quarter Ken Fisher’s top 5 stock picks delivered an average loss of only 6%, vs. a loss of nearly 20% for the S&P 500 Index. That return was even better than the average return of top 5 hedge fund stocks which lost an average of 6.9% during the first quarter. As you can guess top hedge fund stock picks is a very fertile area to look for good stocks to beat the market.
Insider Monkey leaves no stone unturned when looking for the next great investment idea. For example, this investor can predict short term winners following earnings announcements with 77% accuracy, so we check out his stock picks. A former hedge fund manager is pitching the “next Amazon” in this video; again we are listening. We read hedge fund investor letters and listen to stock pitches at hedge fund conferences. Our best call in 2020 was shorting the market when S&P 500 was trading at 3150 after realizing the coronavirus pandemic’s significance before most investors. Insider Monkey’s monthly newsletter beat the S&P 500 Index by 44 percentage points over the last 3 years.
Keeping this in mind, let’s now take a look at Ken Fisher’s top 10 stock picks at the end of March.
The 10th largest position in billionaire Ken Fisher’s 13F portfolio was Intel Corporation (NASDAQ:INTC). Ken Fisher had $1.5 billion invested in this former technology giant. Intel Corporation isn’t one of the top stocks in most hedge funds’ portfolios. Hedge funds were actually selling their INTC positions heading into the first quarter. Intel shares performed better than most stocks during Q1 and are currently in the black for the year.
The ninth largest position in Fisher’s portfolio was Tencent Holdings. Fisher had more than $1.5 billion invested in this Chinese tech giant. Tencent is a $500 billion company. It is interesting that Ken Fisher picked Tencent as one of its top 10 holdings and shunned a larger position in Facebook, Inc. (NASDAQ:FB). Fisher had only $650 million invested in Facebook even though Facebook Inc.’s market cap is more than $600 billion. This tells us that Ken Fisher isn’t a closet index fund manager. He actively allocated a smaller weight to Facebook Inc. Legendary investor Bill Miller doesn’t think Facebook Inc is a good stock to be invested in after its 2020 gains. In the following video you can watch why Bill Miller thinks it doesn’t make sense today to invest in Facebook, Inc. (NASDAQ:FB) and 6 other recession stocks that performed well so far this year.
The eighth biggest position in Ken Fisher’s portfolio at the end of March was salesforce.com, inc. (NYSE:CRM), valued at $1.57 billion. salesforce.com inc is in our shopping list too. CRM has been a hedge fund favorite for a long time but it really never got too cheap for us to recommend it to our subscribers. CRM shares returned more than 8% this year.
Adobe Inc. (NASDAQ:ADBE) was the sevent biggest position in Fisher’s 13F portfolio. Fisher had more than $1.6 billion invested in Adobe Inc. (NASDAQ:ADBE) at the end of March and those shares are worth 11% more today. Adobe shares trade at a forward price earnings ratio of 37.
Ken Fisher’s sixth biggest position in this coronavirus recession was Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOGL). Fisher had more than $1.7 billion invested in this $919 billion company. Compared to Tencent, salesforce.com, and Adobe, Alphabet Inc is a deep value stock trading at 27 times last year’s earnings. Alphabet shares also delivered positive returns so far this year. All 5 stocks we covered in this article had positive returns. Ken Fisher’s all top 10 holdings actually outperformed the S&P 500 Index this year. We covered Ken Fisher’s remaining 5 stocks picks in an earlier article. You can continue to read about Ken Fisher’s top 5 holdings here.
Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.
