Facebook Inc (FB), HCA Holdings Inc (HCA), Williams Companies Inc (WMB): Best Performing Hedge Fund Darlings Of The Week

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It was an excellent week for Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB), HCA Holdings Inc (NYSE:HCA), and Williams Companies Inc (NYSE:WMB), as the shares of each of these companies moved quite a bit higher for various reasons. In the week starting on June 22, 2015 and closing on June 26, 2015, the shares of the social media giant Facebook rose by 6.67%. Among the primary factors driving the share price rally of Facebook were Piper Jaffray’s target price increase to $120 from $92, and an announcement from HBO, Time Warner Inc (NYSE:TWX)’s pay television service, that it will release the premier episode of two its comedy serials on Facebook. Gene Munster of Piper Jaffray weighed in on the potential of Oculus on Facebook’s future and called it an “insurance policy on the relevance of Facebook’s social portfolio as technology shifts.”  The shares of Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) have grown 11.1% year-to-date and have a current price-to-earnings ratio of 87.79. The hedge funds tracked at Insider Monkey have a bullish outlook on the social networking company, with 129 hedge funds holding positions worth $7.09 billion. Stephen Mandel’s Lone Pine Capital was the biggest investor of Facebook Inc in our database as of March 31, with 8.11 million shares valued at $666.51 million. Todd M. Schroepfer, Chief Technology Officer at Facebook, and David Fischer are among the insiders disposing large numbers of shares of the company. Fischer sold 78,257 shares of Facebook on February 17 along with several other transactions over the last six months. Schroepfer’s biggest insider sale in the last six months was on February 17 when he sold 62,986 shares.

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Why are we interested in the 13F filings of a select group of hedge funds? We use these filings to determine the top 15 small-cap stocks held by these elite funds based on 16 years of research that showed their top small-cap picks are much more profitable than both their large-cap stocks and the broader market as a whole. These small-cap stocks beat the S&P 500 Total Return Index by an average of nearly one percentage point per month in our backtests, which were conducted over the period of 1999 to 2012. Moreover, since the beginning of forward testing from August 2012, the strategy worked just as our research predicted, outperforming the market every year and returning 142% over the last 32 months, which is more than 84 percentage points higher than the returns of the S&P 500 ETF (SPY) (see more details).

HCA Holdings Inc (NYSE:HCA) was another stock gaining value during the week with a 9.05% increase in its share price. The Supreme Court ruling on Thursday that allowed the federal government to continue providing subsidies through Obamacare, or the Affordable Care Act, was the key driver of this boost. The shares of the healthcare services company are up by 23.93% year-to-date and are trading close to their 52-week high at $92.04. HCA Holdings Inc (NYSE:HCA) witnessed high trading volume on Thursday with 11.95 million shares traded throughout the day against its average trading volume of 3.61 million shares, on the day the court ruling came down. Leerink Swann, equity research and asset manager service provider, raised its target share price to $95.00 from a previous target of $85.00. Among the hedge funds we track at Insider Monkey, the sentiment was bullish on HCA Holdings Inc (NYSE:HCA) during the first quarter, with 69 hedge fund managers holding $3.68 billion in the company’s stock, down from 80 hedge funds having $5.04 billion invested at the end of 2014. Larry Robbins’ Glenview Capital holds a large stake in HCA Holdings of 5.18 million shares having a market value of $389.59 million. Milton R. Johnson, CEO of HCA Holdings, sold 140,642 shares of the company on May 18 and June 11 each.

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