Beech Hill Advisors, led by Paul Cantor, Joseph Weiss and Will Wurm, has recently filed its 13F with the SEC, disclosing its long positions in U.S-traded equities as of June 30. According to the filing, the fund manages a public equity portfolio valued at $194.51 million, an 8.6% increase from three months earlier. During the period from April to June, Beech Hill Advisors increased its exposure towards the information technology sector to 24%, elevating the sector to being the one most represented in its portfolio. Following tech stocks are finance stocks, which comprise 19% of the firm’s equity portfolio. Coming back to the firm, the mother company of Beech Hill Advisors, called Beech Hill Partners, traces its origins back to 1932 when a former partner’s family established a retail brokerage house. In 1970, Paul Cantor joined that firm and has since served as the managing partner and president of the firm, together with its successor organizations. In this article, we are going to review the top tech picks of the veteran financial institution, which are represented by several “classic” technology stocks of the day: Apple Inc (NASDAQ:AAPL), Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) and Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL).
Asif Islam / Shutterstock.com
We pay attention to hedge funds’ moves because our research has shown that hedge funds are extremely talented at picking stocks on the long side of their portfolios. It is true that hedge fund investors have been underperforming the market in recent years. However, this was mainly because hedge funds’ short stock picks lost a ton of money during the bull market that started in March 2009. Hedge fund investors also paid an arm and a leg for the services that they received. We have been tracking the performance of hedge funds’ 15 most popular stock picks in real time since the end of August 2012. These stocks have returned 123.1% since then and outperformed the S&P 500 Index by around 65 percentage points (see more details here). That’s why we believe it is important to pay attention to hedge fund sentiment; we also don’t like paying huge fees.
Follow Paul Cantor And Joseph Weiss's Beech Hill Partners
Following a 9.45% cut to its ownership of Apple Inc (NASDAQ:AAPL), Beech Hill Advisors held 92,840 shares of the tech giant, valued at $11.64 million, its most-valuable position. Starting from the middle of July when the company announced its fiscal third quarter earnings, the stock’s share price has plummeted by 13%. Even though the EPS of $1.85, total sales of some $50 billion, and 39.7% gross margins all came in above analysts’ estimates, there are numerous fundamental problems hiding behind the numbers that appear to now be weighing down the stock. In particular, Apple Inc (NASDAQ:AAPL) reported iPhone unit sales of 47.4 million, which were well below estimates. Another concern that seems to be afflicting the stock is the weakness in China’s overall economy, as the country accounts for a growing share of Apple’s sales. The problems in the region may become even harsher after the unexpected devaluation of the country’s currency, the yuan, which took place earlier this week. Among the other funds that we follow, Ken Fisher’s Fisher Asset Management reported having some 11.01 million shares of Apple Inc (NASDAQ:AAPL) worth $1.38 billion as of June 30, increasing his position by 1% in the second quarter.
