With $5.4 trillion under management, it’s the world’s largest asset manager.
For 361 days of the year, hedge funds are black holes—invisible to the public. But once every three months, 45 days after the end of the quarter, they are required by the Securities Exchange Commission to disclose any changes in their holdings in a so-called Form 13f.
I’ve been tracking the 13fs filed by the 20 largest Apple funds for the past four quarters and have discovered something interesting. While the press was focused on the big bets on Apple by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, the action by a much bigger fund has gone largely unnoticed.
Over the past four quarters, it’s the BlackRock funds whose trading most closely aligns with action in Apple’s share price: down last summer, up this spring. The pattern should be clearer going forward, now that three BlackRock funds have been consolidated into one.
Change the quarters (June, September, December, March) in the chart below to watch the action.
Not seeing the nifty interactive bar chart? Try the website.
Founded in 1988 as a risk management and fixed income institutional asset manager, BlackRock is now the world’s largest asset manager with $5.4 trillion under management.
Thanks to friend-of-the-blog Daniel Collins at Whale Wisdom for access to the data.
Note that BlackRock sold about $122 B in AAPL during the same quarter it bought about 169 B, which may represent massive hedging: That sounds like a lot, but shadow banks represent tens of trillions of dollar’s worth of investments. Next to that massive collection of wealth, Apple’s couple of hundred billion in cash doesn’t seem so large anymore….
By my count Berkshire Hathaway (I own BRK.B) owns about 119.5 Million Shares or roughly $17.9 B or just 2.2 % of the company.
What was the max Icahn ever put into AAPL ?
This doesn’t apply to Berkshire, but most big diversified fund shops are heavily loaded by index funds and ETFs that attempt to mimic market holdings. I.e., if Apple is 5% of the S&P 500 index, then Vanguard will have 5% of the Vanguard 500 fund in Apple.
The big fund companies ALSO have “diversified active” and even “concentrated” strategies. But these are either a small fraction of the total company’s assets managed, and/or basically cancel each other out, as in the case of Value and Growth strategies, which add up to the index.
I suggest a bit more inspection of these numbers. When State Street unloaded a bunch of AAPL, did they do the same to GOOG, FB, XON and other large-caps and/or tech stocks? That’d suggest what happened is that some large customers left them for other funds, as a likely explanation. And it’d be very easily checked.
Indexers, Enhanced Indexers or “closet indexers” who hug the benchmark tightly all have little incentive to buy or sell any stock unless the assets they oversee change. Active funds and individual investors still get a lot of press, and there are many thousands of us, but our strategies still have to add up to the total shares outstanding. A big net increase in big funds’ holdings of AAPL as a % of their portfolios means either they got a lot of new customers, or individuals and smaller funds were big sellers. Hard to see that as a market-moving phenomenon.