Billionaire Izzy Englander’s Top 5 Stock Picks

3. Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT)

Value: $1,819,380,000
Percent of Izzy Englander’s 13F Portfolio: 1.31%
Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 258

Microsoft ranks 3^rd on the list of billionaire Izzy Englander’s top 10 stock picks. According to a latest report by Reuters, a draft spending plan by the Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency earmarked $150 million for Microsoft under a contract for a “secure cloud platform.” However, the company is under pressure as two recent security breaches — SolarWinds hit by Russian hackers and Microsoft Exchange platform hit by Chinese hackers — involved its platforms.

According to our database, the number of Microsoft’s long hedge funds positions increased at the end of the fourth quarter of 2020. There were 258 hedge funds that hold a position in Microsoft compared to 234 funds in the third quarter. The company’s most significant stakeholder is Fisher Asset Management, with 23.3 million shares worth $5.2 billion. Microsoft ranks 2nd in our list of the 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds: 2020 Q4 Rankings.

In their Q4 2020 investor letter, Bretton Fund highlighted a few stocks and Microsoft Corp (NASDAQ:MSFT) is one of them. Here is what the fund said:

“Microsoft’s stock also had a great year, returning 42.4% on increased earnings per share of 30%. The main driver of their growth in recent years is their cloud computing business, and while it did see a bump in demand as office workers went remote, most of the growth is from the continued shift of corporate computing systems to “the cloud.” We think this shift is still in its early stages.”