Aquamarine Capital’s Top 5 Stock Picks

3. American Express Company (NYSE:AXP)

Aquamarine’s Stake Value: $29.70 million
Number of shares: 210,000
Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 53

Guy Spier’s hedge fund first disclosed a position in American Express Company (NYSE:AXP) in 2014, seeing his investment nearly triple over the last five years. Aside from Aquamarine, 52 other hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey reported owning stakes in American Express Company (NYSE:AXP) at the end of March, down by eight funds over the quarter.

American Express Company (NYSE:AXP) was mentioned in the fourth-quarter 2020 investor letter of Bretton Fund:

“American Express has elements of both a bank (it extends credit card loans) and a payments processor (most of its revenue is fees from cardholders and merchants) and was hit pretty hard by Covid-19, though we expect most of the impact will be transitory. It has a relatively diversified customer base overall, but a meaningful portion of its card activity is from business travel, which…there wasn’t a lot of last year. Similar to the banks, American Express recognized loan losses in anticipation of large defaults, though it’s not clear all of that will come to pass. Its stock returned -1.1%, while earnings per share were down 53%.”