Nevertheless, smart money investors are bullish on Sunedison and consider the stock to be highly misunderstood by the market. Even though among the funds tracked by Insider Monkey, the company’s popularity declined during the third quarter, these investors still held nearly 47% of the company at the end of September. However, 73 funds amassed stakes with a total value of $1.06 billion heading into the fourth quarter, versus 93 funds with stakes worth $5.68 billion in aggregate a quarter earlier. One of the most bullish investors on Sunedison, has been David Einhorn of Greenlight Capital. Greenlight held 18.61 million shares of SunEdison at the end of September, having trimmed the position by 26% between July and September.
However, in his third-quarter investor letter, Einhorn reiterated his bullish position on Sunedison Inc (NYSE:SUNE) and said that “the market’s focus is too narrow.”
“SUNE’s hard-to-decipher financial statements fed the stock collapse. SUNE consolidates both TERP and GLBL on its GAAP statements. The complicating result is two-fold: First, when SUNE sells a project to TERP or GLBL it bears the operating costs but doesn’t get to book the revenue from the sale. The result is the appearance of an operating loss. Second, TERP and GLBL use non-recourse project finance debt to fund the purchases and the debt appears on SUNE’s balance sheet. The result is that SUNE appears to be heavily levered and losing money. From a GAAP perspective that’s true, but from an economic perspective it is not,” Einhorn said.
In this way, Greenlight forecasted economic 2016 EPS of $1.34, which compares to a loss of $1.86 that analysts currently expect Sunedison Inc (NYSE:SUNE) to deliver next year. You can read more about Einhorn’s take on SunEdison in our article covering Greenlight’s third-quarter investor letter.
After being on the first spot of the top 20 list for weeks, Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) lost some popularity and slid to the third position. The stock inched down by more than 2% in the last trading week of 2015, but lost more than 6% since the start of 2016 as investors become more and more concerned about the company’s iPhone sales, which might decline, on the back of reports that Apple is scaling back the production orders. The decline of the stock emphasizes the company’s dependence on the iPhone and put more pressure on investors that had been riding the iPhone sales wave for the past several years. Nevertheless, Apple’s huge cash pile and new product cycle that should come with the launch of a new iPhone later this year, should help Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL)’s shares offset the decline caused by current concerns.
Among the investors we track, Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) is the second most popular stock with 133 funds reporting long positions as of the end of September. However, the company registered a slight decline in popularity with the number of funds bullish on the stock having fallen by 11 during the third quarter and the 133 funds that reported holding shares in the last round of 13F filings amassed 2.80% of the company’s outstanding stock heading into the fourth quarter. Nevertheless, Carl Icahn, David Einhorn, and other top investors remained big fans of Apple.
