Billionaire Chris Rokos’ Top 5 Stock Picks

3. Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL)

The world’s largest technology giant Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) is among the billionaire Chris Rokos’ top 10 stock picks for 2021. Shares of the most prominent smartphone seller fell significantly in 2021 due to investors’ shift towards growth stocks. Apple stock price is down 8% year to date. Rokos’ initiated a new position in Apple during Q4 by purchasing more than 1.2 million shares.

Artisan Partners Limited Partnership, a high value-added investment management firm, highlighted few stocks including Apple in the Q4 investors’ letter. Here is what Artisan Partners Limited Partnership said:

“We fully exited position in Apple. Apple is a global designer, manufacturer and seller of smartphones, personal computers, tablets, wearables and accessories, which also has a rapidly growing and highly profitable services business. We had been shareholders since 2011, owning Apple in various sizes throughout our investment campaign. Apple remained in the portfolio all these years because the market systematically assigned the company an undemanding asking price despite characteristics which should command a premium. Our differentiated view was Apple had “won” in the smartphone business along with their other product categories as its iOS operating system tied users into an ecosystem and rising services adoption led to increased switching costs for users. Survey data showed users were as happy with Apple products as ever, too. With all these traits in place, the result was a rising installed base and each user becoming more valuable due to services attach rates. When combined with an average asking price, tremendous free cash flow generation, and management pointing all cash flow back to shareholders, the odds of a strong return were heavily tilted in our favor. Apple is likely to remain an extraordinary business for years to come, but we can’t separate the business from the asking price. At over 30X earnings and $2 trillion in value, Apple needs to create opportunities worth hundreds of billions for shareholders to now justify the asking price. So, we exited a long-time holding, but we know being disciplined and recycling capital into better opportunities is the appropriate decision.”