Steve Cohen’s Point72 Asset Management has filed its 13F with the SEC for the reporting period of March 31. The fund manager has revamped its top stock investments by introducing a number of new positions and making additional purchases in several existing ones during the first quarter. Point72 is a well-diversified fund, with the consumer discretionary, energy, and finance sectors being slightly more prominent within its holdings than other sectors. It has an equity portfolio valued at $14.67 billion with its top ten stock holdings representing just 16.25% of that overall value. Visteon Corp (NYSE:VC), EQT Corporation (NYSE:EQT), Suncor Energy Inc. (USA) (NYSE:SU) and Dollar Tree, Inc. (NASDAQ:DLTR) are among the revamped top stock picks of Point72 Asset Management which we’ll discuss in this article.
Professional investors like Cohen spend considerable time and money conducting due diligence on each company they invest in, which makes them the perfect investors to emulate. We analyzed the historical stock picks of these investors and our research revealed that the small-cap picks of these funds performed far better than their large-cap picks, which is where most of their money is invested and why their performances as a whole have been poor. A portfolio of the 15 most popular small-cap stocks outperformed the S&P 500 Total Return Index by 95 basis points per month between 1999 and 2012 in backtesting. The exceptional results of this strategy got even better in forward testing after the strategy went live at the end of August 2012, returning more than 139% and beating the market by more than 80 percentage points since then, and by 4.6 percentage points in the first quarter of this year (see the details).
Visteon Corp (NYSE:VC) ranks as the number one long position in the equity portfolio of Cohen, who owns 2.15 million shares of the automotive parts supplier, with a market value of $207.65 million. Cohen increased his stake in Visteon by 79% during the first quarter and the position accounts for 1.41% of his overall portfolio. It was an excellent quarter for Visteon Corp as the company beat the earnings expectations of the market with its reported earnings per share of $1.10, trouncing the consensus estimate of $0.29 per share by Thomson Reuters. At the same time, Visteon Corp (NYSE:VC) reported net sales of $2.03 billion in the first quarter against net sales of $1.72 billion in the year-ago period. The investment from Cohen had paid off thanks to those stellar earnings, vaulting the stock by more than 13% so far in the second quarter. Solus Alternative Asset Management, Iridian Asset Management, and Jim Simons‘ Renaissance Technologies are some of the other investment managers holding major positions in Visteon.
EQT Corporation (NYSE:EQT) is one of the new positions in Cohen’s portfolio and his current investment in the natural gas producer includes 2.28 million shares with a market value of $188.96 million. The shares of EQT Corporation (NYSE:EQT) have grown 16.79% year-to-date and the company has a market cap of $13.43 billion. One of the subsidiaries of EQT Corp, EQT GP Holdings LP (NYSE:EQGP), started trading on the NYSE last week after offering 26.45 million common shares in its IPO, which represents 9.9% interest in the company. EQT Corporation (NYSE:EQT) owns the remaining 90.1% interest in the newly formed company, which offers partnership interests in EQT Midstream Partners, LP. Some of the primary investors of the natural gas company include Citadel Investment Group, Soros Fund Management, and Israel Englander‘s Millennium Management.
