Hedge fund favorites

Hedge funds piled into Actavis earlier this year, and it paid off. The pharmaceutical company’s stock surged 17 percent for the year through Thursday, well above the 3.5 percent rise for the Standard & Poor’s 500 index. It’s a big deal for hedge funds, because Actavis is a top-10 stock holding for more of them than any other stock, according to a review by Goldman Sachs. So many hedge funds bought Actavis during the first three months of the year that it unseated Apple, the industry’s longtime favorite holding. It may seem pointless to track which stocks are popular among hedge funds. The industry has struggled in recent years, failing to beat the S&P 500 as a group every year from 2009 through 2014. But focusing on just the few dozen stocks that matter most to hedge funds has had a better track record. Each quarter, Goldman Sachs tracks which 50 stocks appear most often in hedge funds’ top-10 holdings lists, and that group has beaten the S&P 500 about two thirds of the time going back to 2001. New entries on the hedge-fund VIP list for the most recent quarter include Family Dollar, Visa and Pharmacyclics.