Best Stocks to Buy According to Fastest Growing Large Quant Fund

Co-founded by John Overdeck and David Siegel, Two Sigma Advisors is one of the largest quant funds in the world. This year has been a roller-coaster for hedge funds as they have seen different performances, with some being in the flat to double-digit losses bracket while others posted double-digit returns. However, 2016 has been a good year for Two Sigma Advisors with the fastest growing fund returning over 10% to investors. The data-driven quantitative hedge fund has been consistently posting good returns in recent years, while other hedge fund strategies have struggled. Generally, quant funds have performed better than macro funds some of which saw significant losses this year. Even long/short equity funds mostly showed poor performance as returns were affected by high market valuations and ultra-low interest rates. We look at the top holdings of Two Sigma Advisors, which is currently managing assets over $38 billion.

At Insider Monkey, we’ve developed an investment strategy that has delivered market-beating returns over the past 12 months. Our strategy identifies the 100 best-performing funds of the previous quarter from among the collection of 700+ successful funds that we track in our database, which we accomplish using our returns methodology. We then study the portfolios of those 100 funds using the latest 13F data to uncover the 30 most popular mid-cap stocks (market caps of between $1 billion and $10 billion) among them to hold until the next filing period. This strategy delivered 18% gains over the past 12 months, more than doubling the 8% returns enjoyed by the S&P 500 ETFs.

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Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) was the top stock pick of Two Sigma Advisors at the end of September. The fund increased its position by 23% to 356,601 shares worth $298 million during the third quarter. Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) has been a favorite of most of the top hedge funds in 2016. Other funds with substantial stakes in the company include Viking Global, Fisher Asset Management, Tiger Global Management and Lone Pine Capital. The stock has gained more than 12% year-to-date outperforming the broader NASDAQ, which is around 9% in the green. Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) is the most popular stock amongst the smart money funds that we track at Insider Monkey. At the end of the third quarter, 150 funds held shares worth $20.79 billion in aggregate, versus 145 funds owning $19.82 billion worth of shares a quarter earlier.