I started telling our premium subscribers to short the market at the end of March 2022 when the S&P 500 Index was trading near the 4600 level. You can find out my current views by downloading the new sample issues of our quarterly and monthly newsletters by logging in (it is free).
Hedge funds, in general, underperform the market during bull markets and outperform during bear markets. Most investors don’t understand that hedge funds are “hedged”. When the S&P 500 Index returns 20+% like it did in 2021, it is a certainty that hedge funds will underperform. It is also a certainty that hedge funds will significantly outperform the market when the market declines 18.2% like it did in 2022. Hedge funds lost 4.25% in 2022 according to HFR. That’s an outperformance of 14 percentage points.
When the markets are up, the financial media complains that hedge funds underperform. When the markets are down, the financial media complains that hedge funds didn’t protect their investors from losses. We don’t pay attention to what an “average” hedge fund delivers because their returns are distorted for two reasons. First, they charge an arm and a leg for stock picks that are publicly available with a 45-day delay. Second, they hedge but they don’t generate much alpha on the short side. Instead of tracking hedge fund returns, we track the returns of the most popular hedge fund stocks. Over long periods of time the stocks outperformed the market by a very large margin.
Insider Monkey has long been a believer of imitating the top stock picks of hedge funds, and this strategy has helped us beat the market on average over the last several years. For instance, between March 2017 and January 2023 our monthly newsletter’s stock picks returned 160%, vs. 86.8% for the SPY. Our stock picks outperformed the market by 73 percentage points. Our stock picks outperformed the market in every single year since 2017 except 2021. We share these stock picks only with our premium subscribers.
We don’t talk much about our monthly newsletter’s stock picks publicly, but we have been sharing the list of 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds here at Insider Monkey since the end of 2018. The majority of these stocks aren’t traditional value stocks. You can check out our three previous articles about the 30 most popular hedge fund stocks at the end of 2022Q2, 2022 Q1, 2021 Q4, 2021 Q3 and 2021 Q2 here. In May 2021, we shared hedge funds’ top 30 stock picks for 2021 Q1. In February 2021, we also shared hedge funds’ top 30 stock picks. We also shared hedge funds’ top 30 stock picks at the end of November 2020. Three months before that we shared hedge funds’ top 30 stock picks for Q2’20.
This quarter’s top 30 stocks returned 17.1% through the end of March and outperformed the S&P 500 Index by 11.1 percentage points, while the top 10 stocks returned 21.4%, versus a 6.0% gain for SPY during the same period.
Overall, hedge funds’ top 5 stock picks returned 219.1% since 2014 (through March 30th) and beat the S&P 500 Index by 65 percentage points. This outperformance number isn’t as strong as our monthly newsletter’s stock picks’ outperformance figure, but it is still a very respectable figure. Please keep in mind that more than half of investors invest their money in index funds. By investing in hedge funds’ top 5 stock picks, index fund investors could have generated an extra 65 percentage points in returns.
More than half of all investors invest in dumb index funds because they were made to believe that they can’t outperform the market by stock selection (or they are forced to invest in index funds in their companies’ retirement accounts). Hedge funds’ top 5 stock picks beat the S&P 500 index funds by 65 percentage points over a 9-year period. If you are looking for more diversification you could have invested in hedge funds’ top 10 stock picks and outperformed the S&P 500 index funds by 58 percentage points.
Every quarter we process more than 900 hedge funds’ 13F filings and identify the top stocks among ALL 900+ hedge funds. The list of top 10 hedge fund stocks hasn’t changed much since the third quarter of 2018. You can invest in this low turnover simple strategy by subscribing to our quarterly newsletter or simply reading my articles.
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Insider Monkey’s mission is to identify promising (and also terrible) hedge fund stock pitches and share them with our subscribers. We launched our monthly newsletter’s activist strategy more than 6 years ago and this strategy’s picks returned 160% since then and beat the SPY by 73 percentage points. Our subscription prices start at $99 per year and come with a 14-day full refund guarantee.
Nowadays most investors believe that hedge funds lost their “magic touch” a long time ago and can’t beat the market. Don’t trust the returns reported by hedge fund indices. They misrepresent hedge funds’ stock picking skills. Hedge fund indices underperform the market because hedge funds hedge and they charge an arm and a leg for their services. If you want to compare apples to apples, you need to take a look at the performance of the most popular hedge fund stocks vs. the returns of the S&P 500 Index. Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Amazon have consistently been among the top 10 hedge fund picks over the last 10 years since we started publishing our quarterly newsletter. You don’t have to be a math wizard to calculate the mind-numbing returns of these technology stocks most of which now trade for more than $1 trillion valuation.
The best thing about following hedge funds’ top picks on our website is that you don’t need to pay hedge funds an annual 2% fee and 20% of your profits to beat the market. We do that here free of charge using the holdings data from the legally required SEC portfolio disclosures. Our approach is also superior to investing directly into hedge funds because we don’t like to invest in a hedge funds’ 35th best idea when we can invest in only the best stock picks of the best hedge funds.
Below we listed the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds at the end of December 2022. If you are only interested in large-cap stocks, check out the top 10 stocks in this list below:
30. Wells Fargo & Company (NYSE: WFC)
Number of Hedge Funds: 87 (2022Q4)
Number of Hedge Funds: 77 (2022Q3)
Number of Hedge Funds: 83 (2022Q2)
Number of Hedge Funds: 93 (2022Q1)
Number of Hedge Funds: 94 (2021Q4)
Number of Hedge Funds: 88 (2021Q3)
Number of Hedge Funds: 94 (2021Q2)
Total Dollar Amount of Long Hedge Fund Positions: $5.6 billion
Percent of Hedge Funds with Long Positions: 9.3%
First Quarter Return: -8.9%
Popularity Ranking (2022Q3): 43
Popularity Ranking (2022Q2): 30
Popularity Ranking (2022Q1): 24
Popularity Ranking (2021Q4): 24
Popularity Ranking (2021Q3): 27
Popularity Ranking (2021Q2): 23
Noteworthy Hedge Fund Shareholders: Boykin Curry, Theleme Partners
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