The top 100 global hedge funds manage approximately $6.1 trillion in assets. Small investors have, at best, limited access to this so-called smart money, and in most cases no access at all.
But the funds are required by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to provide quarterly reports on their holdings and recent transactions. From those filings, on SEC Form 13F, it is possible to identify what stocks the smart money is holding, what it is buying and what it is selling.
Researchers at WalletHub have reviewed the second-quarter 2017 filings of more than 400 hedge funds and done the pick-and-shovel work to sort out the stocks that are most widely held and those that are most frequently bought and sold.
The five most popular stocks among the hedge funds included in the WalletHub research were Apple, Berkshire Hathaway, Facebook, Alphabet and Wells Fargo.
The five stocks that were most heavily bought in the second quarter were Amazon, Oracle, Philip Morris International, AbbVie and Broadcom.
The five stocks that were most heavily sold were Kellogg, Apple, Eli Lilly, Johnson & Johnson and JPMorgan.
And if you are interested in what the big boys are buying and selling WalletHub has you covered:
Warren Buffett
> Biggest purchase: Bank of New York Mellon
> Biggest sale: IBM
George Soros
> Biggest purchase: Altaba
> Biggest sale: Adecoagro
Carl Icahn
> Biggest purchase: Freeport-McMoRan
> Biggest sale: Xerox
Bill Ackman
> Biggest purchase: Automatic Data Processing
> Biggest sale: Air Products and Chemicals
John Paulson
> Biggest purchase: Vistra Energy
> Biggest sale: Akorn
The following graphic from WalletHub shows the distribution of hedge fund investments by sector.
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Visit the WalletHub website for more details and expert advice.
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