Analysts Suggest You Should Buy These Two Stocks but Hedge Funds Have Mixed Sentiments

Sterne Agee CRT analyst Rob Cihra has played down investor worries regarding iPhone sales in China and believes Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL)’s sales will benefit from their installed customer base that will upgrade to the new devices. Cihra also thinks 2016 revenues could grow by an additional 4.0 percentage points on top of last year’s 19%, as a large portion of Apple customers have not yet switched to larger-screen iPhones.

“… we believe Apple can keep pushing out the law-of-large numbers as it creates its own growth and captures value from others by engineering innovative hardware+software+services in a vertically-integrated model,” said Cihra.

Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) remained the favorite stock of Carl Icahn, who owns 52.76 million shares and Philippe Laffont, who has further increased his holding of the stock by 12% during the second quarter, to amass 8.54 million shares. Cliff Asness is also bullish on this stock, with his fund, AQR Capital Management, reporting ownership of 7.61 million shares in its latest 13F filing. David Einhorn of Greenlight Capital, a long term admirer of Apple, has chosen to trim his investment, reducing his fund’s ownership to 7.38 million shares at the end of June. In general, hedge fund bullishness on the Cupertino-based giant has cooled a bit during the second quarter, with the number of funds reporting long positions having decreased to 144 from 150 at the end of the first quarter. Their cumulative investment accounts for just 2.90% of Apple’s common stock and carried a value of $21.2 billion at the end of June.

Disclosure: none.