Top 20 Most Popular Stocks Among Financial Advisors This Week

Due to the thousands of stocks that are trading on the markets, a retail investor can find it really difficult to pick the stocks worth his or her attention. In order to avoid screening through all of these stocks, one can narrow down their list to stocks that smart money is following. Researchers at TrackStar, which is the official newsletter of Intuition (a division of InvestingChannel), have compiled a list of 20 stocks that ranked as the most searched among financial advisors this week and in this article we will discuss the latest developments surrounding these companies in more detail.

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In addition, we will take a look at the smart money sentiment towards these 20 stocks. We follow over 700 hedge funds and other institutional investors, whose 13F filings we analyze in order to identify trading opportunities. Our database contains some of the best-performing hedge funds, which generate strong returns by investing in companies with strong fundamentals. Our research showed that following these funds into some of their long picks can help us beat the market over the long run (read more details about our small-cap strategy).

Let’s start with Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. (NYSE:WMT), which ranked on the last spot. On Tuesday, Wal-Mart reported its financial results for the third quarter of fiscal year 2016 (ended October 31), which included revenue of $117.41 billion and EPS of $1.03, down from the $119 billion and $1.15 in EPS, that it posted a year earlier. The company also posted comparable store sales of 1.5%, and slightly narrowed its full-year earnings guidance to a range of $4.50-to-$4.65 per share. Among the funds we track, Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. (NYSE:WMT) has 61 shareholders and they held around 3.40% of the company’s outstanding stock at the end of September. Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway inched down its stake in Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. (NYSE:WMT) by 4.20 million shares to 56.19 million shares during the third quarter.

Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL) also ranked among the most searched stocks, which is not surprising, since the tech giant is always in the spotlight. Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL)’s class A stock has surged by over 40% since the beginning of the year and at 21-times forward earnings it is a bit overvalued compared to the S&P 500’s average forward P/E of 15.60. However, the company is expected to grow significantly over the long-run, which is why it is one of the favorite stocks among smart money investors. According to our data, Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL)’s class A stock ranked on the third spot, with 129 funds holding long positions at the end of September, including billionaires Andreas Halvorsen of Viking Global, Ken Fisher of Fisher Asset Management, and Leon Cooperman of Omega Advisors.