For the past nine years, Ultimate Stock-Pickers’ primary goal has been to uncover investment ideas our equity analysts and top investment managers find attractive, in a manner timely enough for investors to gain some value.
As part of this process, Morningstar analysts scour the holdings of 26 different US equity funds. As the data becomes available, we attempt to identify trends and outliers among their holdings as well as any meaningful purchases and sales that took place during the period under examination.
Breaking a long-standing trend, our Ultimate Stock-Pickers were net buyers during the most recent period. While selling conviction was within a normal range, buying conviction was the highest we have seen it in years. Currently, our market fair value estimate stands at 0.98, suggesting stocks are within the realm of reasonableness. As for sector allocation, our top managers remained meaningfully underweight in energy, healthcare, and utilities relative to the weightings of the S&P 500 Index at the end of April.
The trend of more and more capital flowing into passive products has likely made the stock-picking environment more difficult as it results in all equities appreciating, regardless of the valuation of individual constituents.
That said, our Ultimate Stock-Pickers still found some names that piqued their interest, and we believe these are worth highlighting from a valuation perspective.
What Were the Funds Selling?
The conviction buying that took place during the first quarter of 2018 and the beginning part of the second quarter was once again focused on high-quality names with defensible economic moats.
As for the selling activity during the period, most of it seemed to revolve around paring stakes that already were and continue to remain widely held, including wide-moat Microsoft (MSFT), Wells Fargo (WFC), Intel, and Mastercard (MA) as well as narrow-moat Bank of America (BAC), Cisco (CSCO), and TJX.
The overall makeup of the top 10 stock holdings by investment conviction did not change compared with last period—only their order changed. Berkshire, Oracle, JP Morgan (JPM), and Apple (AAPL) all moved up the list while Comcast, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo all moved down.
Berkshire and Oracle moved up the list primarily because of the heavy selling in Wells Fargo, which was being sold with conviction by both Parnassus and Sequoia funds, with Parnassus eliminating its stake entirely. Narrow-moat rated Apple continued to move up the list primarily due to the heavy purchasing by Berkshire Hathaway.
What are the Top Managers Buying?
As for the sectors our top managers focused on, there were three firms each from the financial services and healthcare sectors, as well as three technology names. Wide-moat rated Facebook (FB) and no-moat rated American International Group, were the period's most notable high-conviction purchases, bought with more than twice the conviction of the third placed Alphabet (GOOGL).
Four of our Ultimate Stock-Pickers bought shares of Facebook with conviction, including Sequoia, which had this to say about the new position:
“Lastly, we purchased a small position in Facebook toward the end of the quarter. Remarkably, Facebook controls four social media platforms with more than a billion global users each: Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and the original Facebook ‘Blue App’.
“Though doing so will involve substantial cost, we believe the company will take necessary steps over the coming months and years to restore the damaged trust of its users and advertisers. After factoring these costs into our valuation, we believe the recent controversy enabled us to purchase a very unusual business franchise riding several powerful secular trends at a price earnings multiple only a little higher than that of the overall stock market.
“Though Facebook has unquestionably committed sins for which it must now atone, we believe it remains a far more competitively advantaged, economically attractive, and faster-growing enterprise than the average American business.”
This was in line with the view Morningstar analyst Ali Mogharabi took on the name following the stock's precipitous decline, and the recovery predicted by both Mogharabi and Sequoia has essentially already played out.