Fifty-one of 83 top-200 alpha holders in $MRK filed new positions in Q1 2026, against just 2 exits and 1 trim — a lopsided initiation wave that accounts for the bulk of the cohort's current footprint. Cacti Asset Management opened at 4.71%, the largest new stake in the cohort; Stamos Capital Partners and Hamel Associates both initiated above 3.0%.
Among the 29 holders carried from Q4 2025, direction was mostly sideways. Wellington Management nudged its position up +0.30pp to 1.89%. The sole meaningful trim came from Bradley Foster & Sargent, which cut by −1.44pp to 0.53%. Two exits — ProVise Management Group (from 0.64%) and Caption Management (from 0.29%) — are the only outright departures on record.
Cohort average weight sits at 0.6%, with a range of 0.0% to 4.71%. The distribution is sharply right-skewed: the top five holders (Cacti, Antipodes, Stamos, Hamel, Mondrian) account for the bulk of aggregate weight, while the majority of the 51 initiators entered at or below 0.50%. Antipodes Partners, the second-largest holder at 3.34%, is a carry-over from last quarter with a negligible −0.14pp drift.
Fifty-one initiations in a single quarter is structurally unusual for a large-cap name; most of those entries are sub-0.5% and read more as index-adjacent adds than conviction positions. The high-conviction signal, if any, sits with the handful of managers who opened above 2%.