Where hedge funds invest, other investors follow. That’s why WalletHub has compiled a list of the top 10 stocks hedge funds loved most in the third quarter of 2018.
WalletHub analyzed third quarter filings of over 400 top hedge funds, added up the positions for the same stock and rank-ordered the stocks by their total holdings value.
To calculate the sector breakdown of the positions held by the tracked hedge funds, WalletHub added up all the positions of the hedge funds from the same sector divided by the total amount of the hedge funds’ positions.
Here, in ascending order, are the stocks hedge funds loved in last year's third quarter:
10. Bank of America Corp.
Bank of America is the ninth-largest bank in the world, based on its total assets of $2.3 trillion. Headquartered in Charlotte, N.C., with central hubs in the world’s financial capitols of New York City, London, Hong Kong and Toronto, this stock was loved by hedge funds despite its unchanged value from the second quarter in 2018.
9. Wells Fargo & Company
Founded by William Fargo and Henry Wells in 1852, Wells Fargo & Company is the fourth-largest bank in the U.S., with total assets of $1.9 trillion. The stock dropped in value from the second to the third quarter.
8. Visa
Visa was the first consumer credit card, issued in 1958. Then known as BankAmericard, its parent company expanded the program outside the State of California in 1965, when it began licensing credit card agreements with other banks nationwide. The stock rose in value from the second to the third quarter.
7. Facebook
Facebook is the brainchild of Harvard University roommates Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. It remained a hedge fund holding despite concerns about slower growth, customer privacy, executive departures and rising interest rates.
6. JPMorgan Chase & Company
JPMorgan Chase is a bulge bracket bank, making it one of the world’s largest and most profitable, not just one of the oldest. JPMorgan Chase is the largest bank in the United States and the sixth largest in the world by total assets.
5. Alphabet
Headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., Alphabet was created through a corporate restructuring of internet giant Google in 2015. Shares of Google were converted into Alphabet stock. It had a flat performance in the third quarter.
4. UnitedHealth Group
UnitedHealth Group Inc. is headquartered in Minnetonka, Minn., offering health care products and insurance services. It is the largest health-care company in the world by revenue, with $201 billion in 2017. The stock has consistently brough returns to investors in recent years, as it did in the third quarter.
3. Apple
College dropout Steve Jobs co-founded Apple Computers in the garage of parents’ home in Los Altos, Calif., an area now known as Silicon Valley, in 1976. The tech giant’s top line declined on a year-over-year basis, and its value remained unchanged from the second to third quarter.
2. Amazon
In 1995, the world’s biggest online store launched in founder Jeff Bezos’ garage as a website selling only books under the name Cadabra. Now, headquartered in Seattle, Amazon sells just about anything to anyone on the planet. Amazon and its sister tech stocks, known collectively as FAANG (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google), declined in November 2018 by 2.7 percent.
1. Microsoft Corporation
Started in a family garage in 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen, Microsoft is a multinational technology company with headquarters in Redmond, Wash. In 2018, Microsoft took back the mantle from Apple as the most valuable publicly traded company in the world, after being overtaken by its competitor in 2010. Following a tech stock selloff, Microsoft’s valuation was flat in the third quarter.
The full report can be viewed here.