Morgan Stanley discloses institutional shareholding data, revealing "buying opportunities" in these US tech stocks.

Zhitong App learned that according to a report on US technology stocks released by Morgan Stanley on Monday, Microsoft (MSFT.US) has the lowest institutional ownership among large-cap tech stocks compared to the weight of the S&P 500 index.

Morgan Stanley tracked institutional ownership data of the 15 largest technology companies and compared the average weight of each company in the top 100 actively managed investment portfolios with its weight in the S&P 500 index.

The report stated that, on average, there is a strong relationship between low active institutional ownership and future stock performance after adjusting for market capitalization and earnings.

Microsoft has the lowest ownership percentage, while Meta Platforms remains the stock with the highest ownership percentage among mega-cap stocks.

The research shows that the ownership percentage of mega-cap stocks "has remained relatively unchanged", decreasing by 84 basis points at the end of the third quarter, while the ownership percentage of other large-cap tech stocks increased by 18 basis points.

The gap between Microsoft's weight in the S&P 500 index and its institutional ownership has widened by 4 basis points to -2.21%, while the gap between Apple's (AAPL.US) weight in the S&P 500 index and its institutional ownership has narrowed by 17 basis points to -2.03%.

In addition, the gap between Qualcomm's (QCOM.US) institutional ownership and the weight of the S&P 500 index has increased by about 50 basis points, which "exceeds that of any other large-cap tech stock and is the largest quarterly MoM increase in our data history," according to Morgan Stanley analysts. The stock is currently over-owned to the highest level since 2013.

Furthermore, Meta is the only one among the five tech giants whose institutional ownership weight exceeds the weight of the S&P 500 index.

The report stated, "On average, when the active institutional ownership is significantly lower than the market weight, the stock will experience a technical rebound, and vice versa."

Among large-cap tech stocks, Microsoft has the lowest institutional ownership percentage compared to the weight of the S&P 500 index at -2.21%, followed by Apple at -2.03%, NVIDIA (NVDA.US) at -0.67%, Amazon (AMZN.US) at -0.41%, and Alphabet (GOOGL.US) at -0.24%.

Apart from Microsoft, the average active institutional ownership percentage of other software stocks relative to the weight of the S&P 500 index has decreased by 14 basis points MoM, currently below the three-year average level of 0.55%.