<p>A little more than one year ago, LinkedIn’s stock hit its all-time high and changed hands for $269. Over the course of the next several months, shares of the professional social networking company sunk to as low as $98.25. Yet even while software deals were proliferating in the tech sector, LinkedIn never became a popular comeback trade with the so-called smart money.</p>
<p>Hedge funds largely missed Microsoft’s all-cash purchase of LinkedIn, the biggest tech deal of 2016 that was announced on Monday. Hedge funds are largely absent from the list of LinkedIn’s biggest shareholders. Not a single hedge fund is among LinkedIn’s top ten shareholders, at least based on Securities & Exchange Commission filings that show holdings as of the end of March. That list is dominated by the big mutual fund houses like The Capital Group, T. Rowe Price and Vanguard, other institutional money managers like Sands Capital Management, and BlackRock, the world’s biggest money manager.</p>