Cliff Asness’ Short Position on AMC and His Top 5 Picks

3. Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG)

Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 160 

Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) is a California-based technology firm. Regulatory filings reveal that AQR Capital Management owned over 311,000 shares of Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) at the end of the first quarter of 2022 worth $867 million, representing 1.64% of the portfolio. The company has been in the AQR portfolio since the third quarter of 2017. AQR reduced its stake in the firm by 5% in the first quarter of 2022 compared to fourth quarter data.

On June 2, Piper Sandler analyst Thomas Champion maintained an Overweight rating on Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) stock and lowered the price target to $2,775 from $2,900, noting that digital ad spend was normalizing after two years. 

Among the hedge funds being tracked by Insider Monkey, London-based investment firm TCI Fund Management is a leading shareholder in Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) with 2.3 million shares worth more than $6.6 billion. 

In its Q4 2021 investor letter, Vulcan Value Partners, an asset management firm, highlighted a few stocks and Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) was one of them. Here is what the fund said:

“In contrast, we made a different kind of mistake about a decade ago. Google, now Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG), performed very well for us while we owned it. The company kept outperforming our assumptions and we kept lowering them to be conservative. “Trees do not grow to the sky.” The stock kept going up and our value grew but did not keep pace with the stock. It hit our estimate of fair value and we sold it with a nice gain, patting ourselves on the back. We kept following the company and what they actually did over the next several years was roughly double the assumptions we used to value it. Therefore, our value was too conservative, and we sold it too cheaply, missing many years of compounding. Fortunately, we experienced some volatility several years ago that allowed us to purchase Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) (Google) again with a margin of safety.”