5 High-Yield Dividend Stocks to Buy According to Ken Fisher

3. AstraZeneca PLC (NASDAQ:AZN)

Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 37   

Forward Dividend Yield: 2.32%    

UBS analyst Michael Leuchten recently raised the price target on AstraZeneca PLC (NASDAQ:AZN) stock to GBP10,000 from GBP9,200 with a Buy rating on the shares. Stifel and Deutsche Bank are also bullish on the firm. The company was one of the first to come up with a COVID-19 vaccine – the stock has soared by 20% year-to-date. The company has a market cap of over $185 billion and posted over $26 billion in revenue last year. 

Securities filings show that Fisher Asset Management owned over 18.8 million shares in AstraZeneca PLC (NASDAQ:AZN) at the end of June 2021 worth $1.1 billion, representing 0.70% of the portfolio of the fund. 

At the end of the second quarter of 2021, 37 hedge funds in the database of Insider Monkey held stakes worth $2.7 billion in AstraZeneca PLC (NASDAQ:AZN), up from 34 in the previous quarter worth $2.6 billion.

In its Q4 2020 investor letter, Baron Health Care Fund, an asset management firm, highlighted a few stocks and AstraZeneca PLC (NASDAQ:AZN) was one of them. Here is what the fund said:

“AstraZeneca PLC is a multinational pharmaceutical company developing drugs across multiple therapeutic areas such as oncology and respiratory diseases. Shares were impacted by news of AstraZeneca’s joint development with Oxford University of a viral-based COVID-19 vaccine. Given a mixed data set due to an unforeseen error in dosing that occurred in the Brazilian market, the vaccine timelines slipped, hurting share performance. Our investment thesis on AstraZeneca is not dependent on COVID-19 but rather its best-in-class large-cap growth profile, and we retain conviction.”