Have you ever wondered what happens when the sharpest, most aggressive minds on Wall Street suddenly start agreeing with the patient, long-term crowd? It doesn’t happen often. Actually, it almost never does.
Yet right now, at the end of 2025, that’s exactly what’s going on.
A fresh analysis of more than $8 trillion in equity positions shows something fascinating: six stocks have managed to become top holdings for both hedge funds and mutual funds at the same time. Six. Out of thousands.
When the cowboys and the farmers both want the same piece of land, you probably want to pay attention.
The Six Names Smart Money Can’t Get Enough Of
These aren’t random overlaps. They made both the famous “Hedge Fund VIP” list and the “Mutual Fund Overweight” basket. In other words, they’re names that keep showing up at the very top of filings quarter after quarter.
So here they are—the six stocks that have achieved that rare consensus status:
- CRH
- Mastercard (MA)
- Spotify (SPOT)
- Talen Energy (TLN)
- Visa (V)
- Vertiv (VRT)
Six names from completely different industries, yet somehow they’ve become the common ground between two investor universes that usually live on different planets.
Why This Rare Overlap Actually Matters
In my experience watching markets for years, when hedge funds and mutual funds agree on something, it’s rarely noise. Usually it’s signal.
Hedge funds tend to chase momentum, short squeezes, and thematic explosions. Mutual funds are more about slow, steady compounding and staying fully invested through thick and thin. When those two philosophies converge on the same names, it often means the underlying stories are simply too strong to ignore—no matter your time horizon.
Think of it as the financial equivalent of critics and audiences both giving a movie a 95% on Rotten Tomatoes. It doesn’t guarantee the stock doubles tomorrow, but the odds of something interesting happening just went way up.
Breaking Down the Six Consensus Picks
Let’s go through each one—because they’re a surprisingly eclectic group.
Vertiv (VRT) – The AI Infrastructure Monster
If you’ve been anywhere near the AI trade in 2025, you already know Vertiv. These guys make the cooling systems and power infrastructure that keep data centers from melting when thousands of GPUs are running full blast. Demand has been off the charts, and the stock reflects it—up well over 140% year-to-date at points this quarter.
What’s interesting is that mutual funds, traditionally wary of anything that smells like “this year’s hot story,” have piled in anyway. That tells you the growth visibility here is longer dated than people think.
Mastercard (MA) and Visa (V) – The Payment Duopoly Lives
Yes, everyone keeps saying cashless society, fintech disruption, Buy Now Pay Later, crypto payments, whatever. And yet… here we are in 2025 and the two old giants are still growing revenue double-digits while throwing off oceans of free cash flow.
Both names appearing together isn’t shocking—honestly it would be weirder if one made the list without the other—but the fact that hedge funds haven’t rotated out despite sky-high valuations says something. The network effect moat is still ridiculously wide.
When two companies control 80%+ of an industry that’s growing GDP-plus every year, valuation becomes almost a secondary conversation.
Spotify (SPOT) – Finally Profitable and Still Growing
For years Spotify was the poster child for “great product, terrible margins.” Then 2024-2025 happened. Price increases stuck. Ad load grew. Podcast bets started paying off. Gross margins crossed 30% and the market rewarded it with a monster re-rating.
Hedge funds love the momentum. Mutual funds love that it finally looks like a normal, high-quality software business. Win-win.
CRH – The Quiet Construction Giant
Old-school building materials? In 2025? Hear me out.
After moving its primary listing to the U.S. and going on an acquisition spree, CRH has become the biggest player in North American infrastructure materials almost overnight. With federal infrastructure spending still flowing and data center construction booming (see Vertiv above), demand for aggregates, cement, and asphalt isn’t going anywhere.
Sometimes the best growth stories hide in the least sexy industries.
Talen Energy (TLN) – Nuclear Meets AI
Perhaps the most “2025” name on the list. Talen owns the Susquehanna nuclear plant that’s now partially powering a massive hyperscaler data center campus. When Microsoft signed a 20-year power purchase agreement tied to carbon-free nuclear baseload, the market woke up fast.
Energy + AI + long-term contracts = the kind of predictable growth both hedge funds and mutual funds can love.
What This Says About Where We Are in the Cycle
Step back and look at the list again. You’ve got:
- Two payment networks (defensive growth)
- One streaming platform (consumer discretionary recovery)
- One data center infrastructure play (AI secular)
- One traditional construction materials company (infrastructure spending)
- One nuclear energy provider (AI power crunch solution)
It’s a surprisingly balanced snapshot of late-cycle themes meeting new-cycle opportunities.
Notice what’s not here: pure software, semiconductors, or the Magnificent 7 (except indirectly through data center exposure). The mega-cap tech concentration that dominated 2023-2024 portfolios is noticeably absent from the mutual fund overweight basket and only partially present in hedge fund VIP lists.
In other words, money is rotating—but not abandoning growth entirely. It’s shifting toward growth that needs real-world atoms, not just bits.
Performance Reality Check
Here’s the sobering part: year-to-date through late November 2025, this group of six has basically matched the S&P 500—edging it out by a whopping 10 basis points.
Not exactly earth-shattering outperformance.
But dig deeper and you see something more interesting. During the sharp October-November drawdown, these names actually held up worse than the index. That tells you two things:
- They’d been running hot earlier in the year (especially Vertiv and Talen)
- When growth fears flare up, even “consensus” growth names can get punished
The overlap might actually make them more correlated on the downside than people expect. Something to keep in mind if you’re thinking of chasing the crowd here.
The Bigger Picture for 2026
Consensus rarely stays consensus forever. Today’s darlings can become tomorrow’s overcrowded trades faster than you think.
That said, several of these stories—AI infrastructure, payment network resilience, nuclear renaissance, U.S. re-shoring of building materials—feel like multi-year themes, not quarter-to-quarter fads.
The fact that both short-term traders and long-term allocators are comfortable owning them at the same time is genuinely unusual. And unusual is often where opportunity lives.
Maybe the real takeaway isn’t “buy these six stocks today.” Maybe it’s simpler:
When the smartest aggressive money and the smartest patient money start speaking the same language, it’s worth learning a few words.
Because every once in a while, the entire market agrees on something. And right now, in the closing weeks of 2025, it looks like these six names are it.
Whether that agreement holds into 2026 is anyone’s guess. But for now? The cowboys and the farmers are standing on the same hill, looking at the same horizon.
And that’s worth noticing.
