The One Stock Value Investors and Macro Traders Both Bought Last Quarter

Most quarters, the 13F data tells a story of disagreement. Value managers buy what macro traders are dumping. Activists build stakes in companies quant funds are shorting. That friction is what makes the filings interesting — it is a record of smart people reaching opposite conclusions from the same public information.

Q2 2026 broke that pattern in one specific place. Alphabet.

Five very different managers, one ticker

Berkshire Hathaway raised its Class A Alphabet stake from roughly 54.25 million shares to 78.79 million — a 45% increase in a single quarter, from a firm that normally moves in increments you need a magnifying glass to spot. Seth Klarman's Baupost added. David Tepper added. Dan Loeb's Third Point added. Stanley Druckenmiller, who disclosed something like 48 new positions during the quarter, was in there too.

In aggregate, 38 funds tracked in our dataset bought Alphabet in Q2, representing a net increase of roughly $37.3 billion in disclosed holdings.

Take a second on how strange that lineup is. Klarman is a deep-value manager who built a career on margin-of-safety arithmetic and has historically been allergic to megacap tech. Druckenmiller is a top-down macro trader who rotates on a timeframe measured in months. Berkshire is a permanent-capital vehicle. Loeb is an activist. These are five incompatible processes arriving at the same conclusion in the same ninety days.

That is either a very strong signal or a very crowded trade. Usually it is both, and the interesting question is which one dominates.

What they were probably looking at

Alphabet's Q2 numbers are not subtle. Consolidated revenue rose 24% to $119.8 billion — the twelfth consecutive quarter of double-digit growth. Google Cloud accelerated to 82% growth, reaching $24.8 billion, and the company disclosed a revenue backlog of $519.5 billion, with just over half expected to convert within 24 months.

A half-trillion-dollar backlog is the kind of number that lets a value investor and a macro trader tell themselves different stories with the same data. Klarman can call it contracted, visible cash flow. Druckenmiller can call it a leveraged claim on AI infrastructure demand. Both readings fit.

Meanwhile the stock has been weak — down roughly 10% over the trailing 90 days as of late August — largely because Alphabet raised 2026 capital expenditure guidance to as much as $205 billion. The market read that as margin compression. The 13F filers appear to have read it as a company willingly trading near-term earnings for a durable position, and were happy to buy the resulting drawdown.

Add $5.2 billion paid in July to settle the European Commission's Android case, plus a Swedish court award of roughly $2.1 billion in the PriceRunner matter that Alphabet is appealing, and you have the classic setup that attracts contrarian capital: real business acceleration, visible legal and spending overhangs, a falling price.

Why cross-style agreement is worth flagging

Our overlap tool exists because shared conviction across portfolios means something different than any single manager's conviction does. But raw overlap counts are a blunt instrument. Thirty funds owning Nvidia tells you very little — Nvidia is in everything. What matters is whose portfolios overlap, and whether those managers normally agree.

When funds with genuinely different mandates, time horizons and analytical frameworks converge on one name, one of two things is happening. Either the thesis is robust enough to survive translation across investment philosophies, or the name has become a consensus parking spot — the position you take when you need equity exposure and do not want to explain a strange holding to your investors.

Alphabet in Q2 has features of both. You can check how the position sits inside each manager's full book on the individual pages in our investor directory, and watch how the flow developed across the quarter in the flow view.

The usual caveat, which matters more here

These filings capture positions as of June 30. Alphabet reported Q2 results on July 22 and the stock has traded through a full quarter of news since the snapshot date. Druckenmiller in particular is documented as expressing part of his megacap exposure through call options, which means the disclosed share counts understate some managers' positioning and overstate the permanence of others.

A 45% increase from Berkshire and a fresh options position from a macro trader are not the same commitment, even when they appear as adjacent rows in the same aggregate. Reading them as equivalent is the single most common mistake people make with 13F data.

If you want the broader picture of how these managers are positioned at the asset-class level rather than the single-name level, the macro consensus view aggregates the signals across the funds we track.

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Data sourced from public SEC 13F filings. Educational research only — not investment advice.