YWR: How Consensus is Your Hedge Fund?
Time for our monthly analysis of hedge fund Top 20 holdings. We analyse the Top 21 equity holdings for 337 global hedge funds with AUM > $1bn.
Top 21 Most Consensus Stocks
The Top 21 is mostly unchanged ytd. 100 out of 337 funds own Amazon as a top 20 position. The rest of the list is the same mega-cap growth (MSFT, NVDA, Apple, Semis…, Visa, Mastercard). Then some merger plays (Pioneer, Splunk)
GE is on the list now. That’s notable. We mentioned GE back in January (HCIYHF) when TCI sold MSFT to buy GE for the spin off. Another 19 other funds have made it a top position too. The Global Factor model has also been highlighting Aerospace as an interesting sector.
Below is the list from January 8th.
Top 30 Most Consensus Hedge Funds
Not much change to the most consensus hedge funds either. Millenium, Hudson Bay and Walleye are the top 3. All three funds have the same strategy. They are multi-strat funds built up from diversified pods of independent minded investors with strong risk management (Peak Multi-Strat).
Note: Quantinno is not really a hedge fund.
Holdings Analysis
I’ve put the spreadsheet with every fund’s Top 20 (as of April 1st) at the bottom of this post so you can look up each fund’s holdings.
Important disclosure; these are the stated equity holdings from public filings. It doesn’t show short positions, options, futures, etc. So there could be a lot of overlays going on with these positions that we don’t know.
But just for fun guess the #1 position at Citadel?
I’ll give you a hint. It’s Untouchable #7 and their CEO came by the YWR Studios back in September.
I also noticed Coatue has dropped off the most consensus fund list. Coatue is a well known tech hedge fund and back in January was the 5th most consensus hedge fund. So it’s interesting that they dropped off the list. Let’s see what changes they made to make them less consensus.
Coatue Top 20 Holdings Analysis
Meta..AMD…MSFT…Netflix..Adobe..(standard large cap tech stuff).
Vertiv and Eaton are technically non-consensus (not on the Top 21 list), but are both AI datacenter plays that have gone vertical. Literally. It’s too late to buy it, but check out the investor presentation so you know what’s going on.
Interesting that Coatue sold Alphabet. Moderna is gone too.
Then the new additions at the bottom (Intuitive Surgical, Dominoes and Maplebear, aka Instacart). Dominoes is amazing. It’s been one of the best performing stocks of the last 20 years.
First Citizens Bancshares bought Silicon Valley Bank, which was probably a great transaction.
You know what’s annoying…. I look at the charts and I don’t want to buy any of those stocks here. All great businesses I’m sure, but I’m not wild about the entry points.
So let’s go to the non-consensus hedge funds. What are they doing? A ‘non-consensus hedge fund’ is defined by YWR as a fund whose top 20 positions have no overlap with the Top 21 most consensus holdings list.
Top 40 List for Non-Consensus Hedge Funds
The positioning is a lot more diversified, which is what we would expect, but we do see some goodies. Barclays, BP, Shell.
We know Dirty Dividends likes these, but what professional money manager would risk their career with Barclays and BP?
Who owns Barclays?
RWC Asset Management (London)
Odey Asset Management
And who owns BP?
Odey Asset Management
Marathon Asset Management
I like these guys. What else do RWC, Marathon and Odey Own?
This is kind of like Netflix. I like Barclays, RWC likes Barclays, so maybe I like something else from their playlist.
Natwest.. wow, Marks and Spencer… wow! StanChart. Yes! Total. Own it! Anglo American.. prefer Glencore… Aviva (6.7% div yield). HP + CSCO (value tech).
And then what do we see right at the bottom?
Unbelievable. Vodafone! Another one from Untouchable 7.
RWC, Odey and Marathon make the cool list.
For fun let’s just check if any of the 337 hedge funds own Mercedes as a Top 20 position.
Nope. Oh well, worth a try.
Feel free to look up your favourite fund and what they own.
The link to the holdings spreadsheet is below.