Top 5 S&P 500 Stocks by Index Weight

2. Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT)

Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 289

Index Weight: 6.860771%

Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) is the secondest largest S&P 500 stock, with an index weight of 6.86%. On June 14, Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) declared a quarterly dividend of $0.68 per share, in line with previous. The dividend is payable on September 14, to shareholders of record on August 17. 

According to Insider Monkey’s first quarter database, Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) was part of 289 hedge fund portfolios, compared to 259 in the earlier quarter. Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust is the largest stakeholder of the company, with a position worth $11.3 billion. 

Here is what Baron Durable Advantage Fund has to say about Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) in its Q1 2023 investor letter:

“Baron Durable Advantage Fund focuses on businesses with these characteristics. Microsoft, our largest holding, is a good case study of a business’s ability to adapt and pivot after years of suffering the consequences of a stale management team that was resting on its laurels. The company’s de facto monopoly position (Microsoft Windows + Office) in enterprise desktop and worker productivity suites in the client-server world made the company complacent and reluctant to take risks and continue to innovate. The stock languished for almost 15 years while Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook led the transition to mobile. Satya Nadella finally took the reins in 2014 and immediately changed the company’s focus from the Windows-centric, on-prem legacy businesses to a cloud-first platform that could be accessed and used from any (mobile) device anywhere in the world. He also made the decision to open the platform to third parties, such as Linux, even though it was likely to hurt Microsoft’s core Windows franchises. Nadella was willing to risk the high-margin on-prem business, recognizing that the world was going to change, and that cloud computing was going to be the future. This bold decision (and a massive multi-year investment) has reinvigorated the company and its stock, with Microsoft Azure, its cloud infrastructure business, surpassing $55 billion in annualized recurring revenue in the last quarter, while still growing 38% year-over-year. The price of Microsoft stock has increased seven-fold since Satya Nadella took over as CEO.”