Beech Hill’s Favorite Tech Stocks This Quarter

Beech Hill Partners, a firm headed by Paul Cantor, Joseph Weiss and Will Wurm, is betting big on the technology sector; as of the end of March the sector represented about 27% of the fund’s equity portfolio. The fund managers are wary of the prevailing market turbulence and as a hedge against they have been more inclined to keep large cash balances and investments are mostly made in high-yielding large-cap companies with strong balance sheets and high free cash flow generation. This us then take a look at which companies fulfill this criteria.

Our research determined that following the small-cap stocks, that hedge funds are collectively bullish on, can help a smaller investor beat the S&P 500 by around 95 basis points per month (see more details here).

#5 QUALCOMM, Inc. (NASDAQ:QCOM)

– Shares Owned by Beech Hill (as of March 31): 74,300

– Value of Holding (as of March 31): $3.80 Million

During the first quarter Beech Hill only added 100 shares to its QUALCOMM, Inc. (NASDAQ:QCOM) position. The stock price of the $77 billion technology company is up by 5.6% so far this year, on the heels of Qualcomm’s satisfactory financial results for the second fiscal quarter in which it managed to beat both top- and bottom-line estimates. The guidance for the third quarter was, however, a mixed one as compared to the expectations that analysts had. Two other recent noteworthy developments involving Qualcomm include the settlement of an arbitration dispute with LG and a 3G/4G patent licensing deal struck with Chinese OEM Hisense. Ken Fisher‘s Fisher Asset Management hiked its QUALCOMM, Inc. (NASDAQ:QCOM) holding by 2% during the first quarter to 9.56 million shares.

#4 Cisco Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CSCO)

– Shares Owned by Beech Hill (as of March 31): 143,400

– Value of Holding (as of March 31): $4.08 Million

Beech Hill inched up its stake in the San Jose-based company by 3% during the first three months of 2016. While trading almost flat year-to-date, Cisco Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CSCO)’s shares are down by more than 7% in the last twelve months, which is still better than the decline of 19% of the communications equipment industry during the same period. Cisco recently has signed a deal with Hyundai, in order to help it establish an industry-leading connected car platform for high-speed transfers of large amounts of data. Moreover, Cisco is also planning to increase its footprint in the networking semiconductor space by acquiring Israel-based Leaba Semiconductor for $320 million in cash. Edinburgh Partners, led by Sandy Nairn, trimmed its Cisco Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CSCO) stake by 4% in the first quarter to 2.85 million shares.