Billionaire Steve Cohen Is Bullish On These Dividend Stocks

#4 Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT)

– Shares Owned by Point72 Asset Management (as of September 30): 2.114 Million

– Value of Holding (as of September 30): $93.57 Million

Shares of Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) had a spectacular 27% rise during the last quarter of 2015. It seems Point72 Asset Management had already anticipated this move and that’s why increased its stake in the company by 2.1 million shares during the third quarter. Even after such a decent rise, Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT)’s stock currently sports a healthy annual dividend yield of 2.63%. Barry Rosenstein’s JANA Partners – which initiated a large stake of 7.7 million shares in the company during the third quarter – believes that Microsoft will continue to increase its dividends and reward its shareholders going forward.

In its third-quarter letter to investors, JANA mentioned, that they “expect dividends to continue to increase and for about $4 billion of cash to be directed toward share repurchases on a quarterly basis.” JANA also believes that the transformation from software licensing to Cloud that Microsoft is currently undergoing is “advantageous for customers and for owners.”

FBR Capital analyst Daniel Ives seems to agree with JANA on this, as in a recently released note to investors he reiterated his ‘Buy’ rating on the stock and mentioned that cloud would be a major growth driver for the company in the future, calling it ‘Rock of Gibraltar’ for Microsoft Corporation. On January 4, the company announced that its recently launched Windows 10 OS is now running on 200 million devices around the world. Microsoft Corporation was one of the most popular stocks among hedge funds covered by Insider Monkey at the end of the third quarter with 113 fund, out of the 730 that we cover, reporting a stake. However, with ownership of over 75 million shares, Jeffrey Ubben’s ValueAct Capital continued to remain its largest shareholder among funds in our database.