Big U.S. hedge funds regain ardor for FAANGs in first quarter: filings

By Jennifer Ablan

(Reuters) – Some of the biggest, highest-profile U.S. hedge fund investors and money managers fell back in love with FAANGs in the first quarter, according to regulatory filings released on Wednesday.

After dumping shares of Facebook Inc, Apple Inc, Amazon.com Inc, Netflix Inc and Alphabet Inc – the FAANG components – prominent hedge fund managers including Tiger Global Management LLC have moved back into the popular group.

Tiger, managed by Chase Coleman, boosted its Facebook stake by 64.5% to 8.8 million class A shares during the first quarter, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. It increased its stake in streaming company Netflix by 42.8% to 2.1 million shares.

T. Rowe Price also added Facebook shares during the first quarter, increasing its stake by 19% to 107.9 million shares, as of the end of first quarter.

Netflix shares closed up 2.7 percent and Facebook gained 3.1 percent on Wednesday.

Quarterly disclosures of hedge fund managers’ stock holdings in 13F filings with the SEC are one of a few public ways of tracking what the managers are buying and selling. But the disclosures are made 45 days after the end of each quarter and may not reflect current positions.

Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc said it owned $860.6 million of Amazon shares at the end of March, after the billionaire earlier this month admitted to having underestimated the online retailer and its chief executive, Jeff Bezos.

Buffett, who told CNBC in early May that Berkshire had bought Amazon shares for the first time, detailed the stake in Wednesday’s 13F filing, revealing that Berkshire took a stake in the first quarter totaling 483,300 shares.

Buffett had told CNBC that the Amazon investment was made by one of his portfolio managers, Todd Combs or Ted Weschler, and said he had been “an idiot” for not investing in Amazon himself.

Amazon shares on March 29, the last trading day of that month, closed at $1,780.85. On Wednesday they finished at $1,871.15.

(Reporting by Jennifer Ablan; Editing by Leslie Adler)