Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN), Citizens Financial Group Inc (CFG), Twitter Inc (TWTR): Hedge Funds Buying Up These Five Stocks

Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) lands in fifth, with a gain of 20 hedge fund owners from our database during the quarter. 96 funds reported holding an aggregate of $8.40 billion in Amazon’s stock, an increase from 76 funds holding $5.91 billion worth of shares at the end of 2014. Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) also wowed investors with its earnings report delivered in the first quarter, showing a massive uptick in earnings to $0.45 per share, crushing the paltry estimates of $0.17 per share. However, unlike Twitter, Amazon has followed it up with another strong earnings report which has only sent shares even higher, now up by 36% year-to-date. Revenue growth was strong, though earnings did slip back into negative territory. Investors seemed little concerned with that however and were instead bullish on the strong growth of Amazon Web Services, which generated $265 million in operating income during the first quarter. That had to please some of Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN)’s new investors, including Donald Chiboucis’ Columbus Circle Investors and Rob Citrone’s Discovery Capital Management.

Why are we interested in the 13F filings and trading activity of a select group of hedge funds? We use these filings to determine the top 15 small-cap stocks held by these elite funds, based on 16 years of research that showed their top small-cap picks are much more profitable than both their large-cap stocks and the broader market as a whole. These small-cap stocks beat the S&P 500 Total Return Index by an average of nearly one percentage point per month in our backtests, which were conducted over the period of 1999 to 2012. Moreover, since the beginning of forward testing from August 2012, the strategy worked just as our research predicted, outperforming the market every year and returning 139% over the last 32 months, which is more than 80 percentage points higher than the returns of the S&P 500 ETF (SPY) (see more details).

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