Billionaire John Paulson’s Top 10 Stock Picks
In this article, we presented billionaire John Paulson’s top 10 stock picks. Click to skip ahead and see Billionaire John Paulson’s Top 5 Stock Picks.
The investing guru billionaire John Paulson, who converted his hedge fund into a family office in 2020, has benefited from its bullish bets on gold and healthcare stocks in 2020 after seeing lackluster returns in the past few years. The founder of New York-based hedge fund Paulson & Co is famous for making $20 billion in profits for betting against the financial collapse in 2008. Although Paulson gained roughly $5 billion in 2010 on a bet on gold, its strategy of investing billions of dollars into gold markets negatively impacted its portfolio in the last decade.
John Paulson founded Paulson & Co in 1994 and the hedge fund managed almost $36 billion of assets at its peak, but assets under management fell to $9 billion last year. The fund is currently managing almost $10 billion in assets under management and its 13F portfolio’s value stood around $3.2 billion at the end of the September quarter.
John Paulson seeks to invest for the long-term, with the average time held for the top ten stock stands around 10 quarters. The healthcare sector accounts for 44% of the overall portfolio, thanks to big stakes in Horizon Therapeutics and Bausch Health Companies. Investments in the basic material sector account for 24% of the 13F portfolio while communication services weighting stands just over 9%. Paulson & Co has also diversified its portfolio towards financial services, consumer cyclical, and real estate sectors.
John Paulson of Paulson & Co
Paulson & Co is well known for investing in merger arbitrage, event-driven, and distressed assets. Prior to Paulson & Co, the investing guru worked as a managing director in mergers and acquisitions at Bear Stearns. He received a Master of Business Administration degree from Harvard Business School in 1980.
While John Paulson’s reputation remains intact, the same can’t be said of the hedge fund industry as a whole, as its reputation has been tarnished in the last decade during which its hedged returns couldn’t keep up with the unhedged returns of the market indices. On the other hand, Insider Monkey’s research was able to identify in advance a select group of hedge fund holdings that outperformed the S&P 500 ETFs by more than 88 percentage points since March 2017 (see the details here). We were also able to identify in advance a select group of hedge fund holdings that significantly underperformed the market. We have been tracking and sharing the list of these stocks since February 2017 and they lost 13% through November 16. You can subscribe to our free newsletter on our homepage to receive our stories in your inbox.
Let’s start reviewing billionaire John Paulson’s top 10 stock picks to see whether one of the most prominent hedge fund manager’s long-running investments worked in 2020.