A Look At Financial Advisors’ Most-Searched Stocks Shows More Focus on Energy

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The U.S stock market is extending its losing streak, with the S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average down by some 7% and 8% year-to-date, respectively, in volatile trading. As we have been doing for the past several weeks, we have analyzed the stocks that were the most searched for by financial advisors last week, in order to get a better idea regarding the market trends in the opinion of smart money investors. Interestingly, as oil slid below the $30 mark, financial advisors focused their attention on energy stocks; out of the top-20 most searched tickers for the week of January 10-to-January 16, 13 tickers represented energy stocks. At the same time, financial advisors kept their interest in technology, with Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) maintaining its leading position in the list. In this article, we are going to take a look at the five most searched stocks among financial advisors last week, based on data from Trackstar, the official newsletter of Investing Channel’s Intuition.

Additionally, we are going to take a look at the smart money surrounding these stocks, based on our own analysis of equity portfolios of some 730 hedge funds and other institutional investors. Through extensive research, we determined that imitating some of their picks can help generate market-beating returns over the long run. However, the best approach is to focus on the small-cap picks of these investors, since they are usually less followed by the broader market and are less price-efficient. Our backtests that covered the period between 1999 and 2012, showed that following the 15 most popular small-caps among hedge funds can help a retail investor beat the market by an average of 95 basis points per month (see more details here).

As stated earlier, Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) remained the most-searched for stock throughout the last week. The beginning of 2016 was marked by Apple’s stock falling below the $100 mark amid the overall market decline, worries about a slowdown of the Chinese economy (one of Apple’s key markets) and fears of a drop in iPhone sales that the company might register this year. However, investors might have overreacted. Since the beginning of the year, several analysts have reaffirmed their bullish rating on the stock. On January 19, Goldman Sachs reiterated its ‘Conviction-Buy’ rating and $155 price target on Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL), while last week, Nomura, JP Morgan, and several other analysts reiterated ‘Buy’ ratings and price targets that signal considerable upside potential. The investors from our database are also fond of Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL), with 133 funds holding around 2.80% of the company’s stock as of the end of September.

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On the following pages we are going to discuss one biotech stock that ranked as the second most-searched ticker and three energy stocks.

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