After being the number one hedge fund pick for three years in a row, AAPL has been replaced by insurance giant AIG, says Goldman Sachs, with the Cupertino, Calif., company dropping to third place.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.