The biggest buyer of Apple last quarter—by far—was Apple itself, which bought and retired 31 million shares on the open market and repurchased by previous arrangement with big financial institutions at least another 38 million shares.
But there were plenty of sellers happy to unload the stock, and Apple closed the quarter pretty much where it started, at $124.43, up an even $1.
So who was dumping Apple? Some very big funds.
The biggest, according to Whale Wisdom, was State Street Corp., which sold 14.6 million shares of Apple but remains the company’s second largest investor with 222 million shares under management.
With more courage of its convictions was Lone Pine Capital, which sold all the Apple in its portfolio, a total of 6.8 million shares.
(State Street moved heavily into Google, Lone Pine into Microsoft.)
The information comes from the 13f forms that funds with over $100,000 under management are required to file with the SEC a month and a half after the close of each quarter. For the rest of the 361 days of the year, it bears repeating, these institutions are giant black holes.
According to Whale Wisdom’s Dan Collings, Apple topped his list once again—both in terms of the number of firms holding the stock (2,180) and in the value of their holdings ($418 billion).
Overall, according to Collins’ summary:
83 funds created new Apple positions
929 added to an existing Apple position
69 closed their Apple position
983 reduced their Apple position
Rounding out the picture, here are the 12 biggest (non-Apple) buyers and the 12 firms with the biggest Apple holdings as of June 30, 2015.
Click to enlarge.
Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter at @philiped. Read his Apple (AAPL) coverage at coins2day.com/ped or subscribe via his RSS feed.