The 45 Stocks That Big Hedge Funds Love The Most

Date: Thursday, August 23, 2012
Author: Rob Wile, Business Insider

Research group Factset is out with its latest quarterly report on the equities exposure for the  50 largest hedge funds. 

They found that 45 of 50 managers increased their stock positions by an average of 3 percent in Q2.

Procter & Gamble and BP were the big winners: the top 50 hedge funds more than doubled the number of shares they own of each stock during the quarter.

The funds surveyed range from James Simon's $34 billion Renaissance Technologies to young gun William von Mueffling's $4 billion Cantillon.

Read on to see who else came out on top among the country's most influential financial players.

We ranked the stocks in order of number of funds holding the stock. 

And one definition note, "market cap" refers to the aggregate value of the funds' holdings of the given stock.