Sunday, August 24, 2014

How you can learn from the smartest investors using Consensus Stocks

Today I am going to show you one example how I use hedgemind.com to help me invest like the smartest investors. 

The Consensus Stocks page shows you the top 100 most popular stocks among top hedge fund manages we carefully selected. These 183 or so money managers include legendary investors like Warren Buffett, George Soros, Carl Icahn, as well as emerging top hedge fund managers like David Tepper, Chase Coleman, Daivd EinhornStephen Mandel


How do I use Consensus Stocks page to help my investing? 

Every quarter when new 13F data is updated, hedgemind.com will publish immediately Consensus Stocks rankings based on the total number of hedge fund holders. The Consensus Stocks lists the top 100 most popular stocks among hedge funds.  

The first thing I do is to review the top 10 most popular stocks among hedge fund managers since it reflects the collective wisdom of the smartest investors. I study each stock by browsing through its Stock Holders page and then Stock Holding History page of each hedge fund holder. Let me walk you through this process by using AAPL stock as an example:


This quarter, AAPL became the most loved stock among all 183 hedge funds and has 53 hedge fund holders, a 29% of hedge fund manages. To see who are these 53 hedge fund managers, clicking AAPL brings you to the AAPL Stock Holders page. The Stock Holder page shows  the name of hedge fund manager who held AAPL and its portfolio weight in his portfolio. if a holding with portfolio weight of 5% or higher, it indicates strong conviction of hedge fund manager and typically this stock is a top ten holding of the portfolio  as well.


As we can see, Carl Icahn is the largest holder of AAPL with 52.8 million shares (split adjusted), a total value of more than $5.3 billion as of today's price. Clicking Carl Icahn takes you to the Icahn's AAPL holding history page. Here you can see Icahn only used three quarters to accumulate a full position after acquired half of total position initially. It is clear that Icahn likes to initiate a significant stake first, then keep adding more in the next few quarters until it is fully accumulated.  


Now let's take a look another AAPL Holding History of a well known Tiger Cubs fund manager, Philippe Laffont. You can see Laffont held AAPL stock for a while but he traded around actively from quarter to quarter. His active style of investing is in great contrast to that of David Einhorn who chose to buy and hold for a long time and only occasionally decreases or increases slightly. 


Clearly a lot of insights can be learned from studying these pages. I personally benefited from this kind of analysis. In fact, 5 of my top holdings are among the top 10 most popular stocks, AAPL, FB, EBAY, GM, C. All of them produced great return for my own portfolio so far. So if you are an investor who actively manages your own money, hedgemind.com offers you the best resource to study and learn from the smartest investors. Even better, we made it FREE!