Lumida Whale Watch: Hedge Fund Bets Revealed

All right. Good afternoon. Good morning. Hopeeveryone's doing well. We're going to do a review of these 13F filings from thevarious hedge funds, uh, and by way of background. So a 13F filing is a Uh, arequirement for certain SEC registered investment advisors, including hedgefunds to file, uh, there's a 45 day lag.

So what's great is we get to see the cardsthat leading hedge funds institutions are holding. Uh, and that data is as ofend of June. That'd be 45 days ago. What's great about end of June is that youare also near a local market top. So we get to see how folks were positioningaround that. I like this exercise one for idea generation.

You know, we found a stock called Tidewaterthrough this process. Don't own it now, maybe in one or two accounts, reallydon't own it anymore. Uh, so there are a lot of interesting ideas you can findhere. We also spotted Nvidia early through this process. We just saw a bunch ofhedge funds blowing up on this.

And then we did our own independent thesisresearch validation. You can't outsource your thinking to anyone. You have toalways independently validate. But it's a good way to spot check your views.against other views in the market. And also it's great to find counter signal,

signal,right? I think the Saudi Arabia sovereign wealth fund is a great source ofcounter signals.

So we'll take a look at that too. Uh, buthopefully you've all been enjoying the, uh, rally we've seen, right? Thismorning, we saw that unemployment claims dropped, beating expectations. Numberone. Number two, we saw retail sales beat expectations. What's the number onesector right now in the S& P 500? It's consumer discretionary.

The U. S. consumer is not dead. Uh, third,we're seeing inflation continue to improve, right? We saw that starting Tuesdaywith the producer price index coming in favorably. So all that's good news.Macro looks pretty good. Uh, a lot of people freaked out not too long ago andhopefully you all participated.

Obviously, you know, we were on the right sideof that. We wrote about that in our newsletter. And on Monday of the flashcrash, we said, you know, we were buying. So hopefully you all positionedcorrectly. Uh, by the way, as I go through this, uh, tracker, feel free to askquestions. Uh, I can line them up on the screen and we can talk through themfirst.

I'm going to go through what are the mainhighlights from a, just hedge fund positioning overall. Then we'll talk aboutspecific funds and managers. Everyone likes to take a look at likeDruckenmiller and Michael Burry and others. Uh, then we'll talk about specificcompanies and we'll also see what I call them like front run ideas.

Meaning if you see a large institutions got aconcentrated position and they're a seller, they still have a large position,but they are selling. I think that's kind of interesting. Obviously, BillAckman's in that position. Right now with Chipotle and Warren Buffett withApple, uh, and maybe Altimeter with Snowflake.

Okay, so I'm going to share my screen here. Bythe way, to my knowledge, I don't know any other group that does this asthoroughly as we do or in the way that we do. And certainly if you find anyonethat does that, please let me know. I'd love to take a look. Uh, I posted thisonline so you can take a look at the tracker yourself.

And the way it works is we have A couple dozenmanagers over here, organized by category type. It's hard to get the precisecategory sometimes, you have the manager name. You have top positions. So youcan see their top five positions. These are ranked. So number one is their topholding. New positions where they're adding capital.

And then the other bucket here is reducedpositions. So you can see Warren Buffett's top holding is Apple. And his numberone position he's reducing is Apple. So he's trying to get out of that, right?Uh, I like to focus on the top, on the new positions. New positions are newideas. It's always satisfying if you can find a good idea, you canindependently validate it, and you can get in at a better price than the hedgefunds themselves.

That happens sometimes. Uh, again, providedthat, you know, you, you have a, a good, you know, research to validate here.So let's go through a few highlights. So, you know, first off, um, you know,Amazon is in the pull position now in the top holding across funds as of the,uh, end of June, right? So they may have repositioned since then.

Um, let's take a look at Amazon here, Amazon,I'm going to share my screen. So end of June. is around here. And this was thekind of most favored name, uh, across this cohort. You also had, uh, NVIDIA,uh, actually, yeah, NVIDIA shows up four times as well. So NVIDIA was competingwith, with Amazon for that, uh, pole position.

Uh, you know, Meta's in there twice. You seeTaiwan Semiconductor was in there once from Lone Pine Capital. Uh, and so inthe number two position, you have Apple. So Apple shows up four times. This isnew actually, because. Prior quarters, we haven't seen apple in that type ofposition. Although I would note that, you know, these are quant funds thatwe're picking up.

Apple point 72 a millennium a cure man group.And the point of that is that these funds have very high turnover. So it'shighly, Unlikely, or it's difficult to have a read through as to whether thisposition is still there or not. I still like to track what they're doingbecause maybe they're long a position and short an index, for example, maybethere's a theme or pattern at that time.

Uh, what else? So here's another observation.So Tesla is not in a top holding position. It's not even a top 2, top 3, top 4,I don't see anywhere here, top 5, I don't see them even buying it. Uh, we'vealso been bearish on Tesla for reasons we've discussed around. Valuation ismore expensive than anything in MAG7, the earnings growth is limited, themargins are under pressure, they've got competition from China, uh, so, wethink that's pretty rational.

Uh, what are the biggest new ads? So, wetalked about Apple Broadcom, which is going to report, I believe, next week,uh, and you've got, uh, Qualcomm, that's, that's notable, you know, we, weactually also were adding Qualcomm, uh, Over the last few weeks too. So, youknow, what's fun about this study is you don't know who's doing what, you don'tknow who's doing what at the time.

So you've got to make your decision. And thenwe have this 13F, we get to look around and see what cards people are holding.You can see Qualcomm was a new position for, for Tiger Global, for GQGpartners. Uh, for Whale Rock and for Millennium. I actually like those fundstoo. So I feel like we're in good company there.

Um, so what are the hedge fund favorites inorder? So we do a count of this. So Amazon most favored, Microsoft, NVIDIA,then Apple, Google, and Meta in that order, uh, you know, we like Meta, butMeta, you know, is, uh, or was certainly at the end of June, you know, quite abit, uh, expensive. Uh, so what else? Uh, I mentioned point number six, Tesla'sthe least favored amongst the MAC 7.