AppleInsider Staff
After being the number one hedge fund pick for three years in a row, AAPL has been replaced by insurance giant AIG, says Goldman Sachs, with the Cupertino, Calif., company dropping to third place.
According to data from the Goldman Sachs equity strategy team, at the end of the fourth quarter of 2012, Apple was a top-10 holding of 67 hedge funds, down from 109 funds in the quarter previous. By comparison, current number one AIG was held by 117 funds, of which 80 positioned the stock as a top-10 holding, reports Business Insider.
Also moving past Apple on the list was Google, with 73 funds positioning the stock as a top-10 holding. Rounding out the top five most popular stocks for hedge funds were Citigroup and oil producer Nexen, the positions of which were top-10 holdings for 40 funds and 37 funds, respectively.
In its hedge fund VIP list, the investment bank ranks stocks in which "fundamentally-driven hedge funds" have a large stake:
We define stocks that “matter most†to hedge funds as the positions that appear most frequently among the top ten holdings within hedge fund portfolios. For this analysis, we limit our universe to hedge funds with 10 to 200 distinct equity positions in an attempt to isolate fundamentally-driven investors from quantitative funds or funds that mirror private equity investments.
AIG is currently sitting at $37.57 ahead of its earnings report set for release after trading ends on Thursday.
Malcolm Owen
William Gallagher
Charles Martin
Christine McKee
Wesley Hilliard
Andrew Orr
13 Comments
As if this will matter when Apple becomes #1 later this year.
Wow just wowow, so Hedge funds want to invest in a company that already failed but taxpayers bailed out.
Best investment ever, if the management fccksup, the government and taxpayers will refund your money?
Of course hedge funds want to invest in a company that can print their own money rather than a company that makes physical products.
Ever heard of the 500 Trillion dollar derivative market?
Did any AI writer read about Henry Blodget's criminal past for pumping and dumping tech stocks. Business Insider is his new pump and dump scam but it is legal, since he is banned as a stock trader.
Who gives a shit?
Man! Google went flying by Apple. Steve Jobs must be spinning like an armature in his grave seeing how Android has become the world's choice mobile OS. Google is just pounding the crap out of Apple in shareholder value. I tell ya, Apple needs to get into search engines. Why let Google get all the free gravy without nary a challenge?
A roadmap for how Apple can get to number one again.
Sell all the iTunes customer information to advertisers, spend huge amounts
bribinglobbying legislators so they can freely get away with it with little or no repercussions.Waste shareholder money developing flying cars, an AR monocle, tidal power generation, data centres in the Antarctic and other attention grabbing projects.
Change their motto to "Do no evil" then blatantly ignore it.
Pay a few thousand Indians to post scripted statements and arguments of absolute denial in support of the "not doing evil" position, no matter what.