Apple Inc. (AAPL)’s Stock Takes Another Hit after Being Downgraded by Bank of America

Smart Money hold a bullish outlook for Apple, which has been among hedge funds’ most popular stocks for the last several quarters. In this way, a total of 150 hedge funds held positions worth $21.52 billion at the end of the first quarter, versus $20.88 billion a quarter earlier. Carl Icahn‘s Icahn Capital held the largest stake in the company with 52.76 million shares valued at $6.57 billion. Fisher Asset Management, led by Ken Fisher, was another investor in the company, holding 10.81 million shares. Robert Atchinson’s Adage Capital Management and Philippe Laffont’s Coatue Management were among other major shareholders of the company.

Considering all of the factors, we would recommend readers to be watchful of the stock and avoid buying at the present moment.

Why are we interested in the 13F filings 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 from 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 123% over the last 35 months, which is more than 65 percentage points higher than the returns of the S&P 500 ETF (SPY) (see more details).

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