Brown Advisory recently released its Q2 2020 Investor Letter, a copy of which you can download here. The Equity Income Fund posted a return of 18.29% for the quarter, underperforming its benchmark, the S&P 500 Index which returned 20.55% in the same quarter. You should check out Brown Advisory’s top 5 stock picks for investors to buy right now, which could be the biggest winners of the stock market crash.

In the said letter, Brown Advisory highlighted a few stocks and Philip Morris International Inc. (NYSE:PM) is one of them. Philip Morris International Inc. (NYSE:PM) is a cigarette and tobacco manufacturing company. Year-to-date, Philip Morris International Inc. (NYSE:PM) stock lost 11.8% and on July 16th it had a closing price of $75.35. Here is what Brown Advisory said:

"Global tobacco products company Philip Morris International fell after forecasting lower-than-expected cigarette sales volumes in the current quarter, due in large part to widespread COVID-19-related lockdowns in many European and Latin American countries."

[caption id="attachment_589506" align="aligncenter" width="400"]

Pixabay/Public Domain[/caption]

Philip Morris International's overall revenue has been stagnant since 2017, so it looks like the management used COVID-19 as an excuse to distract investors from poor underlying trends. Yesterday we published an article revealing that the sales decline didn't stop Distillate Capital to buy PM during the second. In Q1 2020, the number of bullish hedge fund positions on Philip Morris International Inc. (NYSE:PM) stock decreased by about 16% from the previous quarter (see the chart here), so a number of other hedge fund managers don't seem to agree with Philip Morris' growth potential. Our calculations showed that Philip Morris International Inc. (NYSE:PM) isn't ranked among the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds.

The top 10 stocks among hedge funds returned 185% since the end of 2014 and outperformed the S&P 500 Index ETFs by more than 109 percentage points. We know it sounds unbelievable. You have been dismissing our articles about top hedge fund stocks mostly because you were fed biased information by other media outlets about hedge funds' poor performance. You could have doubled the size of your nest egg by investing in the top hedge fund stocks instead of dumb S&P 500 ETFs. Below you can watch our video about the top 5 hedge fund stocks right now. All of these stocks had positive returns in 2020.

Video: Top 5 Stocks Among Hedge Funds

At Insider Monkey we scour multiple sources to uncover the next great investment idea. For example, on one site we found out that NBA champion Isiah Thomas is now the CEO of this cannabis company. The same site also talks about a snack manufacturer that's growing at 30% annually. Even though we recommend positions in only a tiny fraction of the companies we analyze, we check out as many stocks as we can. We read hedge fund investor letters and listen to stock pitches at hedge fund conferences. Hedge fund sentiment towards Tesla reached its all time high at the end of 2019 and Tesla shares more than tripled this year. We are trying to identify other EV revolution winners, so if you have any good ideas send us an email. You can subscribe to our free enewsletter below to receive our stories in your inbox:

Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.