The Most Popular Tech Stocks Among Hedge Funds: Apple (AAPL), Amazon (AMZN) Sink

#3 Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT)

– Hedge Funds with Long Positions (as of December 31, 2016): 126

– Value of Hedge Funds’ Holdings (as of December 31, 2016): $18.76 Billion

Although the number of hedge funds in our system that reported owning a stake in Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) remained the same by the end of the fourth quarter as it was at the start, the aggregate value of their holdings in the company rose by $625 million during the quarter. Funds that boosted their stakes in the software giant during that period included Christopher Lyle’s SCGE Management and Michael Lowenstein’s Kensico Capital.

On the back of the rapid growth being displayed by its cloud platform Azure, which grew by 93% year-over-year, Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) reported better-than-expected fiscal second quarter numbers earlier this year. The impressive financial performance by the company has translated well for its stock, which is currently trading up by 6% in 2017 and has more than doubled over the last five years. In order to compete with the sales and marketing offerings of Salesforce (NYSE:CRM) and Oracle (NYSE:ORCL), Microsoft revealed last month that it will be joining forces with Adobe. The two companies will create a shared data format between Microsoft’s sales software, called Dynamics, and Adobe’s marketing software suite, called Experience Cloud. On March 23, Microsoft announced that it has finished the development of a Windows 10 version customized for Chinese government use. Sales of the company’s products had taken a hit in the country after Beijing raised cybersecurity concerns related to them.

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