Billionaire Mandel Dumped Apple In Favor Of Facebook and Microsoft

Last week we reported another hedge fund selling its tech holdings including Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Netflix. Glaxis’ Matthew Miller cited that near-term price targets had been reached for many of those positions, and that they felt a defensive posture was in order given seasonality and the current macroeconomic environment. Apple was the second most popular stock among 700+ hedge funds we are tracking at the end of the first quarter. Apple lost a few of its billionaire supporters during the first quarter and dropped to 6th place among billionaires. Even though Apple was in several hedge funds’ portfolio, overall , hedge funds owned less than 3% of Apple’s outstanding shares. Hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey collectively owned 5.7% of the stock market, so overall they were about 50% underweight Apple.

Steve Mandel is a Tiger cub and there were several Tiger cubs with large positions in Apple at the end of March. Our analysis indicates that there is a high level of correlation among these investors because they share ideas with each other. It is likely that other fund managers might be selling their Apple holdings during the second quarter as well. We don’t know exactly why Lone Pine sold out of its Apple position but it isn’t a secret that Apple’s strong performance over the last 12 months is tied to the success of iPhone6 as well as skyrocketing sales in China. Lone Pine said “most of the current investment discussion centers on the future of the European Union, the stability of China and the timing of Federal Reserve interest rate hikes,” in its investor letter. It is possible that the sale of Apple and Baidu shares was a defensive move. We will find out in a couple of hours whether these macro events had any material effect on Apple’s Q2 results.