Bill Miller’s Recent Performance and Largest Holdings

Bill Miller was on top of the investment world just 5 years ago. Since then his $3.85 Billion Legg Mason Capital Management Value (LMVTX) mutual fund lost nearly 40%, whereas the SPY had a slightly positive return. Insider Monkey, your source for free insider trading data, doesn’t need to run regressions to know Bill Miller damaged his pristine reputation with this disastrous performance.

Bill Miller

Despite his poor performance, investors still gave him billions of dollars in hopes he might get his groove back. Bill Miller’s top 25 holdings at the end of 2009 returned 16.1% until last Friday. This might seem satisfactory to most investors, but a low cost index fund such as SPY returned 22.6% during the same time period.

Bill Miller couldn’t beat the market in 2010, but his performance so far in 2011 reminds us of his old glory days. Bill Miller’s top 25 stock holdings at the end of December returned 10.2% in 2011, vs. SPY’s 7%. Here is how each stock performed:

Company Ticker Return Value (Million)
AES CORP AES 5.7% 577
TEXAS INSTRS INC TXN 11.9% 403
CISCO SYS INC CSCO -6.8% 363
WELLS FARGO & CO NEW WFC 5.5% 361
QUALCOMM INC QCOM 19.6% 354
MICROSOFT CORP MSFT -2.5% 332
E M C CORP MASS EMC 18.7% 323
AMERICAN EXPRESS CO AXP 6.5% 288
INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS MACHS IBM 12.8% 283
AMAZON COM INC AMZN 3.6% 269
EBAY INC EBAY 24.1% 259
GENERAL ELECTRIC CO GE 17.2% 259
CITIGROUP INC C 3.8% 252
TIME WARNER INC TWX 18.7% 247
JPMORGAN CHASE & CO JPM 13.3% 245
UNITED CONTL HLDGS INC UAL 13.0% 238
MEDTRONIC INC MDT 11.9% 238
HEWLETT PACKARD CO HPQ 15.6% 237
CONOCOPHILLIPS COP 13.5% 231
AFLAC INC AFL 5.3% 229
PEPSICO INC PEP -2.9% 226
NYSE EURONEXT NYX 26.1% 224
BANK OF AMERICA CORPORATION BAC 10.6% 215
GOLDMAN SACHS GROUP INC GS -0.1% 207
CAPITAL ONE FINL CORP COF 23.9% 200

Bill Miller is invested in some hedge fund favorites such as Citigroup, Microsoft, JP Morgan, and Hewlett-Packard. William Ackman’s Pershing Square,  David Tepper’s Appaloosa, Daniel Loeb’s Third Point, Andreas Halvorsen’s Viking Global, Richard Perry’s Perry Capital, Joseph DiMenna’s Zweig-DiMenna, Leon Cooperman’s Omega Advisors, and John Paulson’s Paulson & Co are among the hedge funds with large Citigroup investments. Lee Ainslie’s Maverick Capital, and Jim Simons’ Renaissance have HPQ in their portfolios. David Einhorn’s Greenlight, Tom Steyer’s Farallon, Ray Dalio’s Bridgewater Associates, Whitney Tilson’s T2 Partners, and Barry Rosenstein’s Jana Partners have large Microsoft holdings.