Legendary investor Carl Icahn’s Icahn Capital LP, in its latest 13F filing, reported holding stakes in a total of 48 companies at the end of the second quarter. The value of Icahn Capital’s equity portfolio stood at over $31 billion at the end of June. Our calculations revealed that Icahn Capital’s 19 long positions delivered a weighted average return of -13.71% in the third quarter. S&P 500 ETF (SPY) lost only 6.5% during the same period. Using the same method of calculation, we found that those positions delivered an average loss of 12.7% year-to-date. Since Icahn might be trading around these positions or buying/selling other positions, his actual returns will be different from the numbers we calculated. In this article, we are going to talk about performance and third quarter returns of Icahn Capital’s top stocks, including Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL).
Icahn is a hedge fund legend that is always on the radar of investors. Icahn recently released a video in which he raised his concerns over the recent global economic trends and the stock market. Icahn seems unhappy with Washington’s policies and the “boardrooms of Corporate America.” In the video, titled “Danger Ahead”, Icahn criticized the US tax code that makes it unattractive for American companies to repatriate funds earned abroad. Talking about the low interest rate environment, Icahn mentioned that rather than spending on core business, companies are spending cash on share buyback programs and takeovers to impress investors and analysts on the Street, while hiding associated costs in their quarterly reports. In this way, earnings that they report are artificially inflated, prompting the stock prices to increase for the wrong reasons.
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We don’t just track the latest moves of hedge funds. We are, in fact, more interested in their 13F filings, which we use to determine the top 15 small-cap stocks held by the funds we track. We gather and share this information based on 16 years of research which showed that these 15 most popular small-cap picks outperformed the market, beating the S&P 500 Total Return Index by nearly one percentage point per month in backtests, and by more than 53 percentage points during the first 3 years since the inception of our newsletter at the end of August 2012. Why pay fees to invest in both the best and worst ideas of a particular hedge fund when you can simply mimic only the very best ideas of the best fund managers on your own?
Let’s get back to Icahn Capital’s top stocks and their performance in the third quarter.
Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL)
Shares Owned by Icahn Capital (as of June 30): 52,760,848
Value of Icahn Capital’s Shares (as of June 30): $6.62 billion
Percentage of Icahn Capital’s Public Equity Portfolio (as of June 30): 21.2%
Third Quarter Returns: -11.66%
Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL), one of the most popular stocks among the investors we track, wasn’t able to deliver positive returns in the third quarter. The 13F data shows that there was a a slight decline in Apple’s popularity during the second quarter. A total of 15 billionaires had an aggregate investment of $12.16 billion in Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) at the end of June, compared to 16 billionaires with $13.05 billion worth of stock at the end of March. A total of 144 hedge funds among those we track were holding stakes in Apple at the end of the second quarter, a decrease from 150 at the end of the first quarter. Shares of Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) have dropped nearly 1% year-to-date. Ken Fisher’s Fisher Asset Management is one of the largest investors among those we track of Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL), with ownership of 11.01 million shares as of June 30.
