Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) and Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) are two of the most popular stocks among retail investors, but the billionaires listed below bought one and sold the other in the third quarter.
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Cliff Asness at AQR Capital Management purchased 719,710 shares of Nvidia, increasing his stake by 5%. He also sold 102,651 shares of Apple, reducing his position by 1%. Nvidia is now the largest holding in the portfolio, and Apple is the second largest.
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Steven Cohen of Point72 Asset Management bought 1.5 million shares of Nvidia, increasing his stake by 75%. He also sold 1.5 million shares of Apple, completely exiting the position. Importantly, Nvidia is now the largest holding in the portfolio, excluding options contracts.
Investors should pay close attention to the trades made by Steven Cohen. Point72 ranks among the top 15 hedge funds in terms of net profits since inception, according to LCH Investments. That said, the trades above were made in the third quarter, which ended in September. So, here is what investors need to know about Nvidia and Apple now.
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Nvidia is the foundation of the artificial intelligence (AI) boom. Most investors probably know Nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs) are used to speed up data center workloads like training machine learning models and running AI applications. In fact, the company has over 80% market share in AI accelerators, according to several analysts.
What investors may not know is Nvidia’s dominance in the AI accelerator market is rooted not only in the superior performance of its chips, but also in the scope of its CUDA software platform. CUDA includes hundreds of code libraries and pretrained models that streamline AI application development across use cases that range from recommender systems to autonomous robots.
That means competitors looking to overcome Nvidia’s dominance will need more than fast chips. They will also need to create a robust software development ecosystem that rivals CUDA. But that is easier said than done. Nvidia has been building out its CUDA platform for the better part of two decades. Consequently, the company is well positioned to maintain its market leadership in AI accelerators.
Nvidia reported exceptional financial results in the third quarter of fiscal 2025. Sales rose 94% to $35 billion and non-GAAP net income jumped 103% to $0.81 per diluted share. That was the sixth consecutive quarter where Nvidia reported triple-digit earnings growth.