3. Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG)
Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 153
Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) is one of the largest technology companies in the world, and also perhaps the largest to employ the consumer facing side of machine learning. The firm offers a wide variety of products such as YouTube, Google Search, and Gmail.
Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG)’s most renowned machine learning product is Google itself. At the heart of Google Search is Google’s machine learning algorithm called RankBrain. This algorithm is behind what is termed Word2vec, a Google technology for translating queries into searcher intent and delivering the correct output. RankBrain uses a variety of factors such as domain strength, keyword optimization, and page load speed to sift out the webpages it believes will serve the searcher’s query out of the billions present on the Internet.
Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) also provides artificial intelligence products for developers such as AutoML, Video AI, and Vision AI. By the end of this year’s second quarter, 153 out of the 895 hedge funds polled by Insider Monkey had invested in the company.
Out of these, Chris Hohn’s TCI Fund Management is Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG)’s largest investor. It owns 2.4 million shares that are worth $5.4 billion.
Merion Road Capital mentioned the company in its Q3 2022 investor letter. Here is what the fund said:
“Portfolio returns continued to get dragged down by some of our core holdings in large-cap technology like Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG). The market positioning and long-term opportunity set for these companies has not changed. Current prices obviously reflect increased macroeconomic risks and risk-free rates/premium. But it’s hard to argue that these risks are not reflected in the price or that GOOG should be disproportionately hurt by rising rates when it is trading at a mid-teen multiple of free cash flow. In any case, GOOG is a secular winner when we look beyond a few months or years.”
