Anadarko Petroleum Corporation (APC), Devon Energy Corp (DVN), Hess Corp. (HES): 3 of 5 Energy Stocks Billionaires Love

We’ve poured through the latest filing period’s 13F’s of the hedge funds we track and built an exhaustive database of the results. In addition to creating several reports on overall fund activity, we’re also looking at the activity of a very specific group of hedge fund managers: the 59 billionaires we track.

Now don’t get us wrong, we’re not suggesting you could become a billionaire as well, simply by following their top picks. After all, their top picks are largely comprised of large-cap companies that tend to deliver lower margins of return. They simply have too much money to invest it all into small-caps. That said, the top picks of billionaires are not without value, as our research has shown they outperformed the market by 2 percentage points annually between 1999 and 2009. While that’s nowhere near the returns they generate on small-cap stocks (see the details), it comes with some of the benefits of investing in large-cap companies: namely stability and often dividends paid out by the companies to shareholders of record each quarter.

We recently published a list of the 10 most popular stocks among hedge fund billionaires at the close of 2014, which no energy stocks were able to crack. With that in mind, let’s take a look at the top five energy stocks billionaires own coming off a rocky (to say the least) year for the sector in 2014.

5. Hess Corp. (NYSE:HES) is the fifth choice of billionaire hedgies, with 8 funds having a hefty $1.55 billion invested in this company. That’s a large contrast to its ownership among all funds, in which it placed 30^th. Paul Singer’s Elliott Associates was by far the biggest investor in Hess, with 17.80 million shares at the end of 2014, and another 1.0 million shares added to that total early in 2015. Steve Cohen and Jim Simons were two other billionaires with stakes in Hess at the close of the year. Hess is up 2.8% year-to-date after weathering 2014 fairly well for an energy company, shedding just 11.14%.

4. Pioneer Natural Resources (NYSE:PXD) lands in fourth, also with 8 billionaire funds, investing $1.61 billion. Pioneer placed much higher than Hess among all funds, landing in seventh, and was one of the few energy stocks last quarter to see some bullish sentiment from hedge funds. While the majority of energy stocks bled fund ownership, Pioneer’s increased from 7.5% to 8%. Andreas Halvorsen, Israel Englander, and Ken Griffin are three of the top billionaire shareholders in Pioneer, which is up 6.75% year-to-date.