Apple Inc. (AAPL), Gilead Sciences (GILD) & Facebook Inc (FB): Among Top Picks of Columbus Circle Investors

Donald Chiboucis’ Columbus Circle Investors is a hedge fund established in 1975 and currently holds around $16 billion in Assets Under Management. The firm’s investment philosophy is Positive Momentum & Positive Surprise and their target is investing in good companies which are exceeding expectations of the investors. The firm is especially successful in picking Small Cap and SMID cap stocks, although the largest portion of its assets is dedicated towards large-cap stocks. Their small cap portfolio has returned 14.4% annually (net of fees) during the last ten years and has beaten the annual return of Russell 2000 Growth index by 7 percentage points.

Our studies have shown that hedge funds’ small cap picks are more successful than their large cap picks when it comes to outperforming the market. Hedge funds are managed by the most skilled and experienced investment analysts, but they charge 2% fixed fee and an additional 20% of any profits earned. This cuts out a significant part of the profits that hedge funds earn from their investors. To use the best investment ideas of hedge funds and not paying any fees we have developed a small-cap strategy which has delivered around 80 basis points in monthly alpha during the last 13-year period (read the details here) and returned 134% in the last 2.5 years, beating the market by some 80 percentage points.

Columbus Circle Investors has recently disclosed its 13F portfolio for the first quarter of 2015, valued at $14.7 billion. Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL), Gilead Sciences, Inc. (NASDAQ:GILD), PPG Industries, Inc. (NYSE:PPG), McKesson Corporation (NYSE:MCK) and Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) are among the top holdings of Columbus Circle Investors as of the end of the first quarter of 2015.

The largest holding of Columbus Circle Investors is represented by Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) in which the fund owns 4.88 million shares, valued at $607.57 million. Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) has recently announced a revenue of $58.0 billion and net profit of $13.6 billion for its second fiscal quarter of 2015, which is significantly above $45.6 billion in revenue and earnings of $10.2 billion for the same period of last year. Moreover, Apple, which owns one of the most profitable businesses ever, announced a dividend of $0.52 per share, payable on May 14, 2015. The company has returned $112 billion to shareholders, including $80 billion in share repurchases in the last 2.5 years and the board has further raised the buyback to $140 billion from the $90 billion level.