What Top Investment Managers Hold in Their Portfolios?

As we have now stepped into summer, the business world has gradually calmed down. As is usually the case, the market typically takes a breather during the summer, which is an excellent opportunity for analyses – among other things, how funds have positioned their portfolios at the end of the first quarter of this year.

Visual Capitalist has selected five funds of different sizes, led by renowned investors who often have a unique perspective on the market and a strategy for building their portfolios.

The differences in portfolio composition highlight the diversity of investment strategies, showing how some of the best investors approach portfolio construction.

1. Berkshire Hathaway

Berkshire Hathaway, a fund valued at $325.1 billion, has one of the most well-known and successful portfolios in the world, which has significantly outperformed the S&P 500 over the long term. The fund of Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger has grown by 260 percent since 2013.

And although Buffett is known for advocating the idea of diversification, nearly half of Berkshire’s portfolio is in the most valuable company on the market – Apple (46 percent). The rest of the portfolio is quite diversified with a mix of bank stocks (Bank of America, American Express), consumer products like Coca-Cola and Kraft Heinz, along with oil and gas companies.

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photo Visual Capitalist

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2. Renaissance Technologies

Hedge fund, valued at $75.4 billion, based in East Setauket, Renaissance Technologies, is known for its use of complex mathematical models and algorithms that have pioneered the practice of quantitative investing.

As a result, Jim Simons’ fund shows a stunning level of diversification, with the largest share of the fund at two percent allocated to pharmaceutical giant Novo Nordisk.

The portfolio is divided among more than 3,900 different companies, clearly demonstrating the fund’s strategy of extracting returns from a diverse collection of investments through an algorithm-driven statistical arbitrage approach.

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photo Visual Capitalist

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3. Bridgewater Associates

Bridgewater Associates, the fund of Ray Dalio, was one of the few hedge funds that predicted and successfully weathered the financial crisis of 2008, largely due to its all-weather strategy. This strategy evidently works well in all economic environments through diversification and equal asset distribution.

As a result, in the fund’s portfolio, which is currently valued at $16.4 billion, there are not too many outliers in percentages, and they have ‘hedges’ against funds. Thus, its largest share in the MSCI Emerging Markets ETF is balanced with the Core S&P 500 ETF.

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photo Visual Capitalist

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4. Duquesne Family Office

Duquesne Family Office, valued at $2.3 billion, has one of the record annual returns – at 30 percent. The investor, hedge fund manager, and philanthropist Stanley Druckenmiller, who stands behind the fund, is known for his macroeconomic approach to investing and for not being afraid to make unique and concentrated bets when he believes in them.

Currently, his riskiest bet, also the largest share (at 13 percent) in his portfolio, is Coupang Inc. – a South Korean e-commerce company based in Seoul. Together with Coupang, Druckenmiller’s investments evidently aim to capitalize on this year’s boom in artificial intelligence, with significant stakes in companies such as NVIDIA (ten percent), Microsoft (nine percent), and Alphabet (four percent).

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photo Visual Capitalist

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5. Scion Asset Management

The smallest of all five mentioned funds, valued at $106.9 million, Scion Asset Management of Michael Burry may be one of the most well-known for its role in the early prediction of the financial crisis of 2008.

The protagonist of the film, The Big Short, Michael Burry is best known for his aggressive investments and investments in troubled assets. The fund’s portfolio reflects this as a good portion of its holdings at the end of the first quarter of this year was in various bank stocks that significantly fell during the month of March.

Indeed, Burry’s largest holdings are in Chinese e-commerce companies JD.com (ten percent) and Alibaba (ten percent), indicating Burry’s belief in a resurgence of China.

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photo Visual Capitalist

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