15 Dow Stocks Listed and Ranked By 2022 Hedge Fund Bullishness Index

13. Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. (NYSE:GS)

Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 71

Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. (NYSE:GS) is a bank holding company which ranks among the ‘Big Four’ investment banks in the United States. 

71 hedge funds reported ownership stakes in Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. (NYSE:GS) as of the end of March with a combined value of $4.59 billion. That was down from 75 hedge funds in the previous quarter with $5.38 billion worth of positions in the company. Eagle Capital Management, with a $1.12 billion stake, was the largest shareholder of Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. (NYSE:GS) in the first quarter. 

Ariel Investments, an investment management firm, talked about many stocks in its Q4 2021 investor letter, and Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. (NYSE:GS) was one of them. Here is what the fund said:

“Rising interest rates, after a surprisingly long period of low absolute rates and negative “real” rates, will create a headwind. While there has been much debate about the cause of these low rates, we believe the most important factor has been the $120 billion in monthly federal reserve open market bond purchases and the accumulation of an $8 trillion balance sheet. The former will end, and the latter will shrink. It is not just the Fed that has aggressively purchased bonds, bidding up prices and lowering yields. Bond traders and hedge fund managers have added to positions, confident that being on the same side as the Fed was the wise place to be. Now as the Fed is about to become a seller of bonds rather than a buyer, Wall Street’s “smart money” is likely to follow suit. Against this backdrop, fixed income securities and bond substitutes such as high dividend paying utilities and absolute return hedge funds are substantially overpriced and are not likely to produce attractive returns going forward.

This expectation of a reversion to the mean for interest rates helped 2021 performance, though not as much as we had hoped. The yield on the U.S. 10-year Treasury did indeed increase from +0.92% at the beginning of the year to +1.52% at year-end. An underreported story was the poor performance of bonds last year. The Barclays Aggregate Index declined -1.67% for the year ending December compared to a return of +28.71% for equities as measured by the S&P 500. Interest rates have continued to climb in 2022 with the 10-year Treasury at +1.79% as we go to print. This move higher in rates has contributed to our good, early start to 2022. The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. (GS) jumped +47.59% for the year and +1.73% in the quarter.”