Apple Inc. (AAPL), Facebook Inc (FB), Amazon, Alphabet Inc: Quant Models Like Only Two of These Stocks

Finally, there’s Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL). On the one hand, only five out of the six quants covered in this article owned shares of Alphabet during the third quarter, excluding PDT Partners. On the other hand, four of these five funds increased their stakes, while one, Hutchin Hill Capital, initiated a stake during the third quarter. However, Hutchin Hill held just 5,500 class C shares of Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) at the end of September. On the other hand, most of the remaining funds held both class A and class C shares and all of them held class A shares, so we’ll focus on that. The largest stakes are held by AQR Capital Management and Renaissance Technologies, which owned 548,238 shares and 524,048 shares, respectively. Moreover, RenTech boosted its position by tenfold during the third quarter. D. E. Shaw also increased its stake by 146% to 361,482 shares, while Two Sigma Advisors raised it by 12% to 365,160 shares. Alphabet’s both classes of stock rank among the most popular in our database and combined they make Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL) the favorite company among hedge funds tracked by us.

Now that we have discussed how the six quants traded each of these four stocks during the third quarter and looking at the general sentiment towards them, we can narrow down the list to two stocks. Judging by the data collected, the two stocks that we think that are worth more attention are Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) and Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN). Both of these stocks were on the top two positions in the equity portfolios of two funds and both had the largest number of quants holding shares at the end of September. However, it’s important to mention that this conclusion is rather subjective and obviously more research is required before making a decision regarding the inclusion of these stocks in one’s portfolio.

Disclosure: none