5 Important Stock Picks of Major Hedge Funds in 2021

4. Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL)

Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 120  

Gain in Share Price Over Past Year as of January 4: 38.7%  

Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) has continued to register impressive gains even though tech stocks undergo a period of correction. Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) has withstood disruption and competition at the market due in part to the strong demand for iPhones and the development of an ecosystem that people world over have praised as the best in the business. There are over a billion active iPhones across the globe and over 1.6 billion active Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) devices. This gives the firm strong competitive and monetary advantages over peers. 

Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) has also grown the services business over the past year to complement the improvement in hardware offerings. The services business has over 745 million paid subscriptions that contribute a huge chunk to the revenue and will likely grow the gross margins for the firm in the coming years.

Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) recently crossed $3 trillion in market capitalization, cementing its status as the largest firm in the world. At the end of the third quarter of 2021, 120 hedge funds in the database of Insider Monkey held stakes worth $146 billion in Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL). 

In its Q1 2021 investor letter, Distillate Capital, an asset management firm, highlighted a few stocks and Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) was one of them. Here is what the fund said:

“Apple is an even more notable situation and one that highlights our free cash valuation methodology and bears further discussion given its Q3 ‘20 sale from our strategy. For an extended period, Apple was extraordinarily inexpensive on a free cash flow basis and was the largest position in our strategy, exceeding 5% of the portfolio.”