Nvidia, AMD and Qualcomm top longs in U.S. semiconductors - BofA

© Reuters

By Sam Boughedda

BofA analysts said in a note Tuesday that the firm's U.S. Semiconductors survey shows investors in the industry are less bullish than in 2020 and 2021.

Over the last week, BofA conducted an online survey of 96 institutional investors on their current ownership of chip stocks, their perception of peer holdings, favorite end-markets, and most/least preferred stocks heading into next year.

The analysts revealed that the top 5 most-mentioned longs were NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA), Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMD), Marvell Technology (NASDAQ:MRVL), Qualcomm (NASDAQ:QCOM), and ASML Holdings (NASDAQ:ASML), while the top 5 most-mentioned shorts were Intel (NASDAQ:INTC), Texas Instruments (NASDAQ:TXN), Wolfspeed Inc (NYSE:WOLF), Microchip Technology (NASDAQ:MCHP), and Qorvo (NASDAQ:QRVO).

"The percentage of investors expecting SOX returns to be modestly or highly bullish (>5%) declined to 54% in Dec '22 survey vs 66% in Dec '21 and 86% in Nov '20. Bearish sentiment moved up to 25% from 5% YoY. Investors appear most concerned about U.S. recession (5.19 score) and excess chip inventory (4.65) but least about over-positioning risk (2.23, lower than 3.0 score last yr.)," explained the analysts.

The analysts added that their peers are even more bearish than them with a perception among investors that the majority of their peers are either underweight (51%) or Neutral (38%) in their semiconductor holdings.

"This compares to their own position which is slightly dominated by Neutral (40%), Overweight (39%), Underweight (18%), and No holdings (4%). Investors were decidedly more upbeat about chip stocks last year (66% overweight)," the analysts continued.