Thanks to the fine folks at FINalternatives, we see the latest quarterly Hedge Fund Monitor Report out of Bank of America Merrill Lynch. These quarterly reports are along the same lines of what we do here at Market Folly in that they examine hedge fund portfolios. Rather than focus on a unique set of funds like we do, they survey the majority of the industry landscape to frame a 'top hedge fund holdings' list.

This data is very useful for those of you wondering which stocks are most widely held amongst hedge funds and we presented the hedge fund data from Q2 earlier on the blog. In the third quarter, hedge funds increased their long equity holdings as gross exposure was up 14% and net exposure was up a whopping 130%.

The ten most popular stocks held by hedge funds include:

1. Bank of America (BAC)
2. Pfizer (PFE)
3. JPMorgan Chase (JPM)
4. Microsoft (MSFT)
5. Citigroup (C)
6. Apple (AAPL)
7. Google (GOOG)
8. Qualcomm (QCOM)
9. Cisco Systems (CSCO)
10. Walmart (WMT)