It is just getting plain silly: with a record 216 hedge funds holding Apple at the end of 2011, why does anyone pay the 2 and 20 any more? Just buy Apple. As a reminder, at the end of Q3 209 hedge funds [3]owned Apple, at the end of Q2 it was 181 [4], at the end of Q1 it was 173 [5]and so on. The paterns is clear. What is also clear is that as Apple goes, so goes the entire hedge fund space. Goldman notes: "30% of fundamentally-driven hedge funds hold at least one share of AAPL. One out of five hedge funds has AAPL among its ten largest long positions. When among the top ten holdings, AAPL represents an average of 8% of total single-stock long equity exposure. In aggregate, hedge funds own only 4% of AAPL market cap with 1.6% average position across all funds."
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