Billionaire Leon Cooperman Largest Technology Bets

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In a recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, billionaire Leon Cooperman‘s Omega Advisors disclosed increasing its stake in New Senior Investment Group Inc (NYSE:SNR) to 3.41 million shares, an increase of about 30% from 2.6 million shares that the fund previously owned at the end of the fourth quarter. Besides this new development, we are going to look at Cooperman’s top technology picks from the investor’s equity portfolio including, Motorola Solutions Inc (NYSE:MSI), eBay Inc (NASDAQ:EBAY) and Loral Space & Communications Ltd. (NASDAQ:LORL).

Leon Cooperman Omega Advisors

While on the outset it might seem a good idea to follow the top picks of some of the most esteemed money managers, our research has disclosed something to the contrary. Using 13F filings for the period between 2009 and 2012 we uncovered that an equally weighted portfolio that consists of 50 most popular hedge fund picks during this period in fact underperformed the market by nearly 7.0 basis points per month. However, the 15 most popular small cap stocks among hedge funds outperformed the market by nearly a percentage point during the same period. The same strategy also beat the S&P 500 ETF (SPY) by a staggering 76.7 percentage points since August 2012 through March 2015 and returned 132%. With a market cap of $1.47 billion Loral Space & Communications Ltd. (NASDAQ:LORL) is the only small cap on this list and hence definitely worth a look.

Leon Cooperman, a former chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs Asset Management founded his hedge fund in 1991 with $450 million in capital. As of February 2015 Omega had nearly $9.4 billion under management while the market value of its portfolio stood at $6.0 billion towards the end of 2014. The investment manager is known to combine macro view with fundamental valuation as part of his investment strategy. The portfolio is concentrated in finance with 28% of the holdings accounting for the sector. Information technology forms 12% of Omega’s portfolio value.

An increase of 11% in eBay Inc (NASDAQ:EBAY)‘s stake during the fourth quarter took the holding in Mr. Cooperman’s equity portfolio to 3.53 million shares valued at $198.08 million. This made the technology company that enables commerce through marketplaces, payments and enterprise, the largest holding of Cooperman in the technology sector. Among the billionaires that we track, 16 had investments in  eBay Inc (NASDAQ:EBAY) totaling $6.73 billion at the end of the fourth quarter. Activist investor, Carl Icahn of Icahn Capital Lp was one of them as he held some 46.27 million shares valued at $2.60 billion.

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