Among thousands of publicly-traded stocks, it’s often difficult to come by new investment ideas and it usually requires a rigorous process. However, there’s a source of many interesting investment opportunities: smart money. Hedge funds and other institutional investors employ a lot of resources in identifying the best stocks to invest in and following their investments is hardly something that hasn’t been done, which is why financial media often covers the moves and comments made by great investors like Warren Buffett, George Soros, or Carl Icahn.
Due to the current regulations, we have access to hedge funds’ portfolios, or at least a part of them. Every quarter, institutional investors with assets worth over $100 million must file a 13F filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission within 45 days of the end of a quarter. These filings provide a glimpse into the long positions of smart money investors and even though some say they are unreliable, they in fact can provide a trove of information. The key is not to just simply piggyback hedge funds’ moves disclosed via 13F filings, but to carefully choose which funds to follow and which stocks to focus on for best performance.
This is where our research comes in handy. We have selected a list of some 650 hedge funds and institutional investors, whose portfolios provide a lot of investing ideas. After every round of 13F filings, we analyze these funds’ collective sentiment towards thousands of stocks, and, based on this data, we select a bunch of stocks that we share with our premium subscribers. This approach has generated a return of over 67% since May 2014, when the strategy was launched, and outperformed the S&P 500 ETF (SPY) by around 25 percentage points. You can read more details about our strategy and download a free sample of our premium newsletter here.
In addition to looking at collective data from 13F filings, we can also select individual investors and identify some interesting stock picks from their portfolios. In this article, we are going to look closer at billionaire George Soros, who, aside from being the favorite boogeyman of nationalists and dictators, is actually one of the most successful and richest investors in the world. Even though, George Soros retired from managing investment funds in 2011, after registering average annual returns of 20% since founding Soros Fund Management in 1969, he still plays a role in the firm’s life as its chairman.
In its latest 13F filing, Soros Fund Management revealed an equity portfolio worth $4.20 billion as of the end of September, down from $5.62 billion a quarter earlier. During the third quarter, the fund closed its stakes in 86 stocks, including Snap Inc (NYSE:SNAP) and Williams Companies Inc (NYSE:WMB). It also initiated 112 new positions in companies like Campbell Soup Company (NYSE:CPB), Solaredge Technologies Inc (NASDAQ:SEDG), and GrubHub Inc (NYSE:GRUB).
Having said that, let’s take a closer look at the top five dividend stocks from Soros Fund Management’s equity portfolio.
