Rising and Fading Stars in Tech as Top Fund Holdings

March 27, 2013 by Jon C. Ogg

Credit Suisse has reviewed and screened the holdings of 857 large cap mutual funds and has seen that technology is very well represented in the top holdings on average at this universe of funds. In fact, Credit Suisse pointed out that nine of the top 25 holdings were actually technology stocks. After taking a look at the list, it is interesting that the firm pointed out which were in the investment bank’s lists of Rising Stars and Fading Stars.

Hopefully the lists do not really need much of an explanation. The nine most widely held are: Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL), Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT), Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG), Qualcomm Inc. (NASDAQ: QCOM), Oracle Corp. (NASDAQ: ORCL), International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE: IBM), Cisco Systems Inc. (NASDAQ: CSCO), EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC) and Visa Inc. (NYSE: V).

What Credit Suisse was trying to show is that it found that six stock names were on its list of Rising Stars and seven were on the list of Fading Stars. Rising Stars from the technology sector include several Internet software and services names such as Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ: FB), Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO), eBay Inc. (NASDAQ: EBAY), Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) and LinkedIn Corp. (NYSE: LNKD). Credit Suisse said that the Fading Stars from the sector include Intel Corp. (NASDAQ: INTC), Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT), AutoDesk Inc. (NASDAQ: ADSK), Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ), Western Union Co. (NYSE: WU), KLA-Tencor Corp. (NASDAQ: KLAC) and VeriFone Systems Inc. (NYSE: PAY).

Performance has been lackluster also. The report said:

The most widely owned big cap stocks within large cap funds lagged the broader S&P 500 and Russell 1000 indices in 4Q12 due to poor performance in October and December. So far in 2013 these names have continued to lag, despite outperforming in February… Rising Stars fared well in 4Q12 and have continued to outperform so far in 2013, though the group is lagging in March. Fading Stars have lagged in both 4Q12 and early 2013, though performance has improved in March.

As a reminder, evaluating portfolio holdings at this point does have a one-quarter look back. These are still the most recent holdings available.

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