Five Best Stocks to Buy According To Quant Billionaires

One of the best ways to pick high-performing stocks is to follow the industry leaders and find out their stock investments. Today, we decided to cover some common stock picks of Jim Simons’ Renaissance Technologies and Cliff Asness’ AQR Capital Management. Jim Simons and Cliff Asness are both known for their knowledge of the finance world and understanding of the stock market. Jim Simons focuses towards the inefficiencies of the stock market, whereas Cliff Asness performs fundamental analysis to understand the true value of a stock.

Both investors like to diversify their portfolios across sectors and industries. In this article we will take a look at a couple of companies, in which both Simons and Asness hold long positions, such as Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL), Gilead Sciences, Inc. (NASDAQ:GILD), Amgen, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMGN), PepsiCo, Inc. (NYSE:PEP), and Intel Corporation (NASDAQ:INTC).

At Insider Monkey, we track hedge funds’ moves in order to identify actionable patterns and profit from them. Our research has shown that hedge funds’ large-cap stock picks historically delivered a monthly alpha of six basis points, though these stocks underperformed the S&P 500 Total Return Index by an average of seven basis points per month between 1999 and 2012. On the other hand, the 15 most popular small-cap stocks among hedge funds outperformed the S&P 500 Index by an average of 95 basis points per month (read the details here). Since the official launch of our small-cap strategy in August 2012, it has performed just as predicted, returning over 144% and beating the market by more than 84 percentage points. We believe the data is clear: investors will be better off by focusing on small-cap stocks utilizing hedge fund expertise rather than large-cap stocks.

Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) represents the largest holding of AQR Capital Management, which owns 6.89 million shares valued at $857.71 million, while Jim Simons’ Renaissance Technologies owns 2.22 million shares worth $276.10 million. The Cupertino-based device maker is set to launch Apple Music next week with iOS 8.4 version. After an open letter from Taylor Swift, Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) has announced that it will pay musicians for the content downloaded during the trial period. The company will offer a 3-month trial after which, Apple Music will be available for monthly charges of $9.99 for single users and $14.99 for family plans. Among the funds we track, billionaires Carl Icahn’s Icahn Capital and Ken Fisher’s Fisher Asset Management also hold large positions in Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) as of the end of March.