Insider activity at Coca-Cola has been insipid since the beginning of the current year, with the exception of two relatively major sell-offs by the President of The Coca-Cola Company’s Europe Group, James Quincey. The first sell-off contained 171,800 shares, while the other one involved a number of 114,784 shares. James Quincey exercised options and sold all of these shares for roughly $12.11 million, remaining with 24,695 shares. In the meantime, insider trading at PepsiCo hasn’t been too interesting either, as there were no insider purchases in 2015. By the same token, even though the insider sales have seen more activity, the sell-offs were not significant at all. However, one of the noteworthy sell-offs involved Indra Nooyi, the Chairman and CEO at PepsiCo, who sold 58,054 shares in 2015 andwas left with a remaining stake of 736,349 shares.
In addition to insider buying and selling, we will also take a look at the hedge fund activity in the shares of these two companies. Coca-Cola is owned by 65 hedge funds compared to 58 which reported ownership positions during the previous quarter. However, the value of the overall holdings decreased to $21.71 billion from $22.45 billion, though this was because of the decrease in share price during the quarter; aggregate shares held actually increased slightly. Within our database, Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway is indisputably the largest shareholder in Coca-Cola by owning 400 million shares, which represent 15.13% of its entire public equity portfolio. Furthermore, Donald Yacktman’s Yacktman Asset Management, which is the second-largest shareholder in Coca-Cola within our database, has slightly reduced its stake in the company to 38.93 million shares. In the meantime, the number of hedge funds that hold equity stakes in PepsiCo increased to 61 from 54, while the total value of the investments increased to $8.02 billion from $7.17 billion. Interestingly enough, Donald Yacktman represents the largest investor in Pepsico Inc. (NYSE:PEP) with 25.49 million shares, which might indicate that he is not focused on choosing a better performer between the two but is rather is betting on higher performance of the beverage industry in general. Within our database, Nelson Peltz’s Trian Partners is the second-largest shareholder in PepsiCo with 18.32 million shares.
Follow Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway
To conclude with, it’s up to you which stock to choose between the two beverage titans, but we do believe that both companies tend to be influenced by the same external factors and perform similarly despite having some differences in their market focus.
Winner: Draw
Disclosure: None
