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Apple has been 'the biggest wealth destroyer' for investors

Apple has been 'the biggest wealth destroyer' for investors

Investors managed to make it through a volatile April modestly ahead of the game, though individual returns were held back by one principal culprit: Apple.

The tech giant was "the biggest wealth destroyer" for market participants during the month, according to Openfolio, a social networking platform that compares more than 65,000 shared portfolios within its community.

In an April where the S&P 500 (INDEX: .SPX) managed to eke out a nearly 1 percent gain, Openfolio portfolios on average gained 1.3 percent. Both gains would have been even more if not for Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL), which fell nearly 14 percent in April and, as of the market close Monday, had suffered losses for eight straight days.

Apple's decline hits especially hard because it is both the most-owned stock on Openfolio and atop the favorites list for mutual funds. Apple appears in more than 27 percent of Openfolio portfolios, while mutual funds own 28.1 percent of its shares, according to FactSet. Some 363 mutual funds owned the stock as of the end of 2015, a decline of four from the previous quarter, with Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) the second most-popular and Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOGL) third, according to Credit Suisse.

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Apple was off 10 percent year to date as of midday trading Tuesday and has subtracted about 92 points from the Dow Jones Industrial Average (Dow Jones Global Indexes: .DJI) in the second quarter alone, a period during which the blue chip index is just above positive.

Despite the narrow outperformance in April, Openfolio's users generally have lagged the market over the past 12 months. In total, the site's participants have seen returns of -6.74 percent during the period, while the S&P 500, including dividends, gained 1.2 percent.

That trend, too, has been reflected in the broader market and also has a lot to do with the underperformance of fund managers' most-loved stocks.

Just 19 percent of large-cap fund managers beat basic benchmarks in the first quarter of 2016, according to Bank of America/Merrill Lynch, which said the number was the lowest total since it began keeping such records in 1998.

Returns for the 10 most-owned stocks were 7 percentage points below the 10 most-neglected, BofAML reported.

About one-third of Openfolio users lost money in the month, with one-third of those getting hit by bad bets on single stocks. In age groups, 25-to-34-year-olds performed best, using an allocation of 45 percent each to single stocks and exchange-traded funds and 10 percent to cash.



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