Business Insider India has updated its Privacy and Cookie policy. We use cookies to ensure that we give you the better experience on our website. If you continue without changing your settings, we\'ll assume that you are happy to receive all cookies on the Business Insider India website. However, you can change your cookie setting at any time by clicking on our Cookie Policy at any time. You can also see our Privacy Policy.
If you're ever at a loss for what to do in the stock market, following the so-called smart money is never a bad idea.
This has been especially true so far in 2019. Boasting an 18% return, a Goldman Sachs-maintained basket of the stocks most popular with hedge funds has beaten the benchmark by a full three percentage points this year.
And lest you think it's too late to invest in these stocks since they've already risen so much, Goldman is here to dispel that notion. The firm has run the numbers and found that hedge-fund ownership has historically been a strong signal for future stock returns.
"Rather than signaling 'over-ownership,' stocks with a large number of hedge fund owners have consistently outperformed peers," a group of Goldman strategists wrote in a recent client note. "Surprisingly, this pattern has held even for stocks with elevated multiples relative to their histories."
Advertisement
The chart below shows this dynamic at play:
With that established, following the lead of hedge funds seems like a sound strategy. To that end, we've provided below the stocks most popular with them.
The list is based on the holdings of 855 hedge funds with $2.1 trillion of gross equity positions, as analyzed by Goldman at the start of the second quarter. The 17 most popular stocks are listed in increasing order of how many hedge funds own them.