Billionaire Mason Hawkins’ Top Stock Picks

Mason Hawkins‘ Southeastern Asset Management revealed its holdings in a regulatory filing. The investment manager has a 13F portfolio of $15.93 billion as of the reporting period. The fund’s 13F portfolio is mainly focused on finance, energy and consumer discretionary companies. Hawkins has maintained his top positions in Level 3 Communications, Inc. (NYSE:LVLT), Loews Corporation (NYSE:L), CONSOL Energy Inc. (NYSE:CNX), McDonald’s Corporation (NYSE:MCD) and Chesapeake Energy Corporation (NYSE:CHK) with slight changes over the first quarter. Before launching his investment firm in 1975, Hawkins worked as a director of research at Atlantic National Bank and First Tennessee Investment Management between 1971 and 1975. Southeastern Asset Management is an employee-owned investment management firm and it manages funds of Longleaf Partners. Assets under management of Southeastern Asset Management was $34.5 billion in which $17.4 billion invested in US Large Cap Equities, $4.5 billion invested in US Small Cap Equities, $10.3 billion invested in Global Equities and $2.3 billion invested in Non-US Equities as of June 30, 2014. Mason Hawkins’ Southeastern Asset Management recently has filed its 13F with the SEC for the reporting period of March 31.

Insider Monkey has a research team directed by Dr. Ian Dogan who has a Ph.D. in financial economics with a specialization in insider trading. Our research team is closely following more than 700 hedge funds and other investment managers including Mason Hawkins’ Southeastern Asset Management. Our research has shown that hedge funds are extremely talented at identifying undervalued stocks especially in the small-cap space. The 15 most popular small-cap stocks among hedge funds outperformed the S&P 500 Total Return Index by an average of 95 basis points per month between 1999 and 2012. We have also been tracking the performance of these stocks in real time since the end of August 2012. These stocks returned 143.7% through May 15th and has beaten the S&P 500 ETF (SPY) by over 80 percentage points (see the details here).

Coming back to Southeastern Asset Management’s top stock picks in its 13F portfolio, the top spot was occupied by Level 3 Communications, Inc. (NYSE:LVLT) with the fund owning 45.24 million shares valued at $2.44 billion constituting 15.29% of the total 13F portfolio of the fund. Hawkins has reduced the position in the company by 9.50 million shares during the first quarter. Level 3 Communications, Inc. (NYSE:LVLT) is a $19.67 billion integrated telecommunications services provider.