Ray Dalio and Billionaires Are Crazy About These Stocks

With its stock price up by almost 64% over the last year, Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) might be heading for yet new heights as the company launched its first smartwatch and a 12″ retina MacBook featuring haptic Force Touch sensors that enable users to send different software commands depending on how hard they press, at a special event last week.

Dalio’s third largest stake, Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) comprising of 601,000 shares valued at $27.92 million was the second most popular company among billionaires after Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL), among those on this list; 14 billionaires held around $2.64 billion in the company’s stock at the end of the fourth quarter. For its second fiscal quarter Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) reported an EPS of $0.71 which was in-line with the estimates and $26.47 billion in revenues that beat estimates by $140 million.

Despite a 15.4% drop in stock price over the last year, 10 billionaires had vested their trust and more importantly $13.34 billion in International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE:IBM) at the end of the fourth quarter. Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway is one of the most bullish shareholders of the company, holding 76.97 million shares valued at $12.35 billion of the technology company. Investors including Duquesne Capital’s Stanley Druckenmiller, disagree with Buffet’s position. Druckenmiller believes that International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE:IBM)’s problems are secular rather than cyclical, and the share buy back program is not going to fix anything. Dalio’s stake in the company comprised of 147,100 shares valued at $23.61 million.

The steep decline in oil prices in June last year has led many energy companies like Devon Energy Corp (NYSE:DVN) to trade at favorable levels, provided of course that they are eventually able to come out of this price havoc relatively unscathed. While Dalio’s stake in the company stood at about 327,700 shares valued at $20.06 million, 8 other billionaires had also piled in $996.9 million into the energy company by the end of 2014. Ken Griffin of Citadel Investment Group held the highest holding with some 8.6 million shares valued at $529 million.  Devon Energy Corp (NYSE:DVN)’s hedging strategy which involves 107 Mbbls/d hedged at $91 is expected to partly offset the slide in oil prices for most of this year.

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