Stock picks of the rich | Bankrate.com

You might think that the wealthy invest their money in expensive hedge funds or individual stocks. But increasingly, they favor keeping it simple in ways that average investors can replicate.

The founder and chairman of Tiger 21, an investing club made up of 202 individuals with at least $10 million to invest, told Bloomberg that members are favoring exchange-traded index funds over?private equity?or hedge funds.

In its annual survey of members, the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust rose to the No. 2 stock pick. Overall, ETFs were more popular than equity hedge funds and mutual funds, with 23 percent of members preferring them for equity investments. Last year, 19 percent of the members preferred ETFs.

Individual stocks are still the No. 1 pick among members for the equity portion of their portfolio, but that method of investing fell by 7 percent, to 43 percent since 2011, while hedge fund investing dropped from 27 percent to 21 percent. Mutual funds are favored by 13 percent of the investors.

The typical portfolio for members includes 23 percent real estate, 22 percent equity, 15 percent private equity, 13 percent fixed income, 13 percent cash, 10 percent hedge funds and 1 percent commodities.

The move toward ETFs, which trade like stocks, and index funds is a sign that members see the market stabilizing and returning to normal, Michael Sonnenfeldt, founder of Tiger 21, told Bloomberg. "Members have crept, crawled and walked back to the kinds of investment portfolios they had before 2008," he said.

Do you believe the market is stabilizing, and have you adjusted your portfolio accordingly?

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Source: http://www.bankrate.com/financing/wealth/stock-picks-of-the-rich/

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