One of the best tools for ordinary investors who are on the hunt for new ideas is 13F filings. Hedge funds hire some of the smartest Ivy League graduates as their analysts, have access to industry insiders whom they “consult” with, unconventional data sources that cost tens of thousands of dollars, years of experience and millions of dollars as incentives to come up with the next great investment idea. Every quarter we process around 750 hedge funds’ 13F filings to identify each hedge fund’s new moves, top stock picks, and more importantly overall sentiment changes towards each of the 4000 stocks that are publicly trading. We publish all of our analysis in our premium quarterly newsletter (download a free sample), and then share interesting bits and pieces on our website.
Earlier today we published the list of 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds. This list’s top 20 stock picks have been performing much better than the market indices that you see on your financial news websites and channels. This year the top 20 most popular hedge fund stocks returned nearly 34% and outperformed the S&P 500 Index by more than 8 percentage points. If you have $500,000 invested in an index fund that tracks the market, you left $40,000 on the table this year by not imitating hedge funds’ top 20 stock picks.
In this article we will list the 5 mega-cap stocks that hedge funds are crazy about. We include only those stocks with at least $100 billion in market capitalization at the end of Q3 in this ranking. These stocks are also among the most popular hedge fund stocks because hundreds of hedge funds can buy these stocks because of their enormous liquidity.
Later this weekend we will publish similar rankings for very large-cap stocks, large-cap stocks, mid-cap stocks, small-cap stocks, micro-cap stocks. We will also publish similar rankings for top IPO stocks among hedge funds, top biotech stocks, and top dividend stocks.
If you don’t want to go through our slideshow, you can also watch this short video below. The top 3 spots didn’t change since the second quarter. The only change we observed during the third quarter was the switch between the stocks in the fourth and fifth spots.
Video: Click the image to watch our video about the top 5 most popular hedge fund stocks.
Here is our list of the 5 mega-cap stocks hedge funds are crazy about:
5. Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOGL): $1,334
Market Cap: $930 billion
Number of Hedge Funds: 147
Total Dollar Amount of Long Hedge Fund Positions:$12.3 billion
Percent of Hedge Funds with Long Positions: 19.7%
Fourth Quarter Return (through November 14th): 7.2%
Popularity Ranking (Q2): 4
Noteworthy Hedge Fund Shareholders: Ken Fisher, Cliff Asness
4. Alibaba Group Holding Limited (NYSE:BABA): $186
Market Cap: $485 billion
Number of Hedge Funds: 149
Total Dollar Amount of Long Hedge Fund Positions:$19.2 billion
Percent of Hedge Funds with Long Positions: 19.9%
Fourth Quarter Return (through November 14th): 9.3%
Popularity Ranking (Q2): 5
Noteworthy Hedge Fund Shareholders: Ken Fisher, D. E. Shaw
3. Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN): $1,739
Market Cap: $863 billion
Number of Hedge Funds: 169
Total Dollar Amount of Long Hedge Fund Positions:$23 billion
Percent of Hedge Funds with Long Positions: 22.6%
Fourth Quarter Return (through November 14th): 1.1%
Popularity Ranking (Q2): 3
Noteworthy Hedge Fund Shareholders: Ken Fisher, Boykin Curry
2. Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT): $150
Market Cap: $1144 billion
Number of Hedge Funds: 173
Total Dollar Amount of Long Hedge Fund Positions:$26.9 billion
Percent of Hedge Funds with Long Positions: 23.1%
Fourth Quarter Return (through November 14th): 6.5%
Popularity Ranking (Q2): 2
Noteworthy Hedge Fund Shareholders: Ken Fisher, Boykin Curry
1. Facebook, Inc. (NASDAQ:FB): $195
Market Cap: $556 billion
Number of Hedge Funds: 178
Total Dollar Amount of Long Hedge Fund Positions:$20.8 billion
Percent of Hedge Funds with Long Positions: 23.8%
Fourth Quarter Return (through November 14th): 8.5%
Popularity Ranking (Q2): 1
Noteworthy Hedge Fund Shareholders: Chase Coleman, Andreas Halvorsen
Disclosure: None. This article was originally published at Insider Monkey.
