On the surface, stocks are having a great year: The Morningstar US Market Index is up more than 13% for the year to date through Aug. 21. But the market has become increasingly unsettled beneath the surface, thanks to persistent concerns about inflation, interest rates, oil prices, tariffs, geopolitical tensions and whether companies will generate enough return on their enormous artificial intelligence capital expenditures.

In this year’s jittery market, which stocks have the pros been selling?

To find out, we’ve looked at the latest portfolios of some of the best fund managers. To isolate the top stock-pickers among current active fund managers, we screened on the following:

  • Actively managed funds that land in the large-blend, large-growth, or large-value Morningstar Categories.
  • Funds with at least one share class earning a Morningstar Medalist Rating of Gold, Silver, or Bronze with 100% analyst coverage.
  • Funds that hold 50 stocks or fewer as of their most recently reported portfolios.

In total, 39 separate fund portfolios passed our screen. We then compared the latest portfolios of these funds with their portfolios three months before to determine which stocks these managers have been selling.

The 10 US stocks top fund managers have been selling lately

Here are some of the stocks that top managers have been scaling back during the past few months:

  1. Microsoft MSFT
  2. Amazon.com AMZN
  3. Meta Platforms META
  4. Snowflake SNOW
  5. Intuit INTU
  6. Phillips 66 PSX
  7. Quanta Services PWR
  8. Datadog DDOG
  9. Cadence Design Systems CDNS
  10. Boston Scientific BSX

Don’t take this as a comprehensive list of stocks to sell. Why? Because a couple of these stocks remain sizable holdings among the best managers; trimming a stock position isn’t the same as bailing out of a name entirely. Also, while some of these stocks look overvalued according to Morningstar, some look fairly valued, or even undervalued. And of course, selling stocks can have tax implications, and tax circumstances differ from investor to investor.

Here’s a little bit about each of the stocks top fund managers have been selling, along with some commentary from the Morningstar analysts who follow the companies. All data is as of Aug. 21, 2026.

Microsoft

  • Number of Best Managers Selling the Stock: 20
  • Morningstar Rating: ★★★★
  • Morningstar Economic Moat Rating: Wide
  • Sector: Technology

Microsoft tops the list of stocks that the best fund managers are selling and is one of five technology names on the list. Morningstar thinks this large-core stock is 19% undervalued.

Microsoft is one of three public cloud providers that can deliver a wide variety of platform-as-a-service and infrastructure-as-a-service solutions at scale. Based on its investment in OpenAI, the company has also emerged as a leader in AI. Microsoft has also enjoyed great success in upselling users on higher-priced Office 365 versions, notably to include advanced telephony features. These factors have combined to drive a more focused company that offers impressive revenue growth with high and expanding margins and deepening ties with customers. We expect solid overall growth despite the company’s size, and slightly improving margins over time to drive the stock.

With rapid growth at massive scale, Azure is clearly the centerpiece of the new Microsoft. Azure has several distinct advantages, including that it offers customers a painless way to experiment and move select workloads to the cloud, creating seamless hybrid cloud environments. Since existing customers remain in the same Microsoft environment, applications and data are easily moved from on-premises to the cloud. Microsoft can also leverage its massive installed base of all Microsoft solutions as a touch point for an Azure move. Azure also is an excellent launching point for secular trends in AI, business intelligence, and Internet of Things, as it continues to launch new services centered around these broad themes. With AI in focus, Microsoft is well positioned to become the orchestration layer for the agentic age.

Microsoft has moved beyond the on-premises focus to cloud delivery so the pain of a model transition is a thing of the past. Office 365 retains its virtual monopoly in office productivity software, which we do not expect to change in the foreseeable future. Lastly, the company is also pushing its gaming business increasingly toward recurring revenues and residing in the cloud. We believe that customers will continue to drive the transition from on-premises to cloud solutions, and revenue growth will remain robust with margins continuing to improve for the next several years.

Amazon.com

  • Number of Best Managers Selling the Stock: 20
  • Morningstar Rating: ★★★★
  • Morningstar Economic Moat Rating: Wide
  • Sector: Consumer Cyclical

Next up is Amazon, the only consumer cyclical company on the list of stocks that the top managers have been selling. Morningstar thinks this large-core stock is 14% undervalued.

Amazon dominates its served markets, notably for e-commerce and cloud services. It benefits from numerous competitive advantages and has emerged as the clear e-commerce leader given its size and scale, which yield an unmatched selection of low-priced goods for consumers. The secular drift toward e-commerce continues unabated with the company continuing to grind out market share gains despite its size. Prime ties Amazon’s e-commerce efforts together and provides a steady stream of high-margin recurring revenue from customers who purchase more frequently from Amazon’s properties. In return, consumers get one-day shipping on millions of items, exclusive video content, and other services, which result in a powerful virtuous circle where customers and sellers attract one another. The Kindle and other devices further bolster the ecosystem by helping attract new customers, while making the value proposition irresistible in retaining existing users.

Through Amazon Web Services, Amazon is also a clear leader in public cloud services. Additionally, the company’s advertising business is already large and continues to scale as ads have made their way into Amazon’s streaming outlets, thus offering an attractive option for marketers looking to access a vast audience with a variety of proprietary data points about those very consumers. AWS and advertising growth should continue to outpace e-commerce growth and should be the main growth drivers over the next five years. This is critical, as each of these segments drives higher margins than the corporate average, which in turn should allow both operating profit and earnings per share to outgrow revenue as margins continue to expand.

From a retail perspective, we expect continued innovation to help drive further share gains in a postlockdown world. We also look for continued penetration into categories such as groceries and luxury goods that have not previously translated into the same level of success as other retail categories. We see technology advancements in AWS and a bigger push to service enterprise customers as helping to maintain the company’s lead there. Overall, we see good revenue and free cash flow growth for years to come.

Meta Platforms

  • Number of Best Managers Selling the Stock: 16
  • Morningstar Rating: ★★★★
  • Morningstar Economic Moat Rating: Wide
  • Sector: Communication Services

Meta is the only large-value company on the list of stocks top managers have been selling. Morningstar thinks shares of this stock are 35% undervalued.

We view Meta as the clear winner in social media. The firm’s application lineup, which includes Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger, has close to 4 billion monthly active users, giving Meta unmatched scale in the sector.

The firm’s strategy is dual-pronged. On the user side, Meta has leveraged its scale and social media savvy to iteratively improve its product lineup, adding attractive features such as Stories, Reels, and even new products such as Threads. Such improvements and additions not only improve user engagement, but also allow Meta to monetize these features and products by layering advertisements onto them.

On the advertising side, Meta allows advertisers of all shapes and sizes to place ads in front of engaged users. The company has benefited greatly from a general shift toward digital advertising within the broader advertising market, with social media advertising gaining substantial share, especially since the coronavirus pandemic. To bolster its advertising business, Meta has invested heavily to improve its ad-targeting algorithms, allowing it to improve its advertisers’ return on ad spending and increasing its average revenue per user over time.

While the firm’s core business remains advertising, Meta has shown a proclivity to expand beyond its ad-based revenue model by investing heavily in hardware, via Reality Labs, and AI, by investing in its own Llama large language model. While the firm’s investments in Reality Labs have been demonstrably unprofitable, we are more optimistic about Meta’s investments in AI. We believe Meta’s AI investments, especially those aimed at improving the firm’s ad-targeting algorithms, are value-accretive.

Beyond ad-targeting, Meta is also investing in consumer-facing AI, via its Llama chatbot, which is accessible to users across its applications. While a monetization strategy for this chatbot remains elusive in the near term, we believe the firm could drive increased user engagement and time spent by allowing its users access to a chatbot assistant within Meta’s applications.

Snowflake

  • Number of Best Managers Selling the Stock: 6
  • Morningstar Rating: ★★
  • Morningstar Economic Moat Rating: None
  • Sector: Technology

Next on the list of stocks that the top managers have been selling is Snowflake; it’s also the first stock that looks overpriced. Morningstar thinks this large-growth stock is 31% overvalued.

Snowflake is a leading data platform that helps enterprises create a single source of truth out of data stored across various public clouds. By separating computing from storage, Snowflake’s core data warehouse and data lake products provide superior scalability at a lower cost compared with on-premises solutions, aligning the companies’ offerings with the value proposition hyperscalers can offer. We think data platforms like Snowflake have already become one of the must-have tools in the public cloud ecosystem.

Snowflake should see high future revenue growth and outstanding net revenue retention as clients put more data-related work on the platform. Although it is not atypical for fast-growing software companies to have a high net revenue retention, new AI-related data applications should stabilize Snowflake’s NRR at around 120% in the near term. Supporting the open-source Iceberg table format is Snowflake’s initial step to expand its addressable market by allowing users to directly query data stored outside of Snowflake. This move expands the total volume of data Snowflake can access, making it closer to an all-in-one data platform offering.

We expect the high competition across different enterprise data platforms to continue. Leading solutions like Snowflake, Databricks, and Google BigQuery are built on different underlying technologies, and each has its optimized use cases. All products are aiming to become a one-stop shop for enterprises’ data needs. At the moment, we don’t think there is a clear winner among the top data platform solutions, and the intense competition could take a toll on Snowflake’s future margin expansion.

Intuit

  • Number of Best Managers Selling the Stock: 10
  • Morningstar Rating: ★★★★
  • Morningstar Economic Moat Rating: Narrow
  • Sector: Technology

One of five 4-star names on the list, Intuit is trading 19% below its fair value estimate. This software application firm lands in the mid-core segment of the Morningstar Style Box.

Intuit owns an array of small business and tax software products that enjoy dominant market positions in their respective verticals. We think Intuit Enterprise Suite, the company’s entry-level enterprise resource planning platform that combines Mailchimp’s front-office and QuickBooks’ back-office functionalities, is a competitive product supporting Intuit’s expansion among midsize companies. In addition, Intuit’s done-for-you products, offering real-time AI and expert support across QuickBooks, Mailchimp, and TurboTax, should become an effective tool that lifts average revenue per customer.

Unlike large enterprises that require complex information systems with advanced capabilities, small and midsize businesses value the convenience of managing their accounting records, customer information, and payrolls on one platform. We think Intuit’s introduction of IES is a favorable strategic move because it combines QuickBooks’ and Mailchimp’s strengths to reduce overhead for high-growth businesses that otherwise need to manage multiple systems on a daily basis. Meanwhile, single-purpose, small-business-oriented software like QuickBooks delivers limited functionality at a monthly cost of several hundred dollars or less. Multipurpose ERP systems targeting midsize companies like Oracle NetSuite are usually priced at tens of thousands of dollars per month including initiation costs. We think IES, as an entry-level ERP service with a monthly price of several thousand dollars, could help Intuit capture new growth opportunities by narrowing the gap between the two existing categories on the market.

TurboTax Live is Intuit’s assisted tax-filing experience that connects individual users with tax accountants in real time. Intuit also offers QB Live and Mailchimp Live, matching small businesses with accounting or marketing professionals. We think both mechanisms have become Intuit’s key differentiators from competitive offerings that are incremental to the company’s moat. The high ARPCs of Live products also present attractive upsell opportunities that drive critical top-line growth in mature markets like small business accounting and DIY tax.

Phillips 66

  • Number of Best Managers Selling the Stock: 2
  • Morningstar Rating: ★★
  • Morningstar Economic Moat Rating: Narrow
  • Sector: Energy

Next on the list of stocks that top managers have been selling is Phillips 66, which is the only energy company. Morningstar thinks this mid-value stock is 52% overvalued.

Phillips 66 offers greater diversification than competitors, with its substantial marketing, chemical, and midstream assets. While refining primarily drives near-term earnings, management prioritizes midstream growth.

Refining remains crucial to Phillips 66’s value despite recent underperformance owng to poor capture rates, low utilization, and rising costs. Management has implemented improvement initiatives that show progress, but must continue to close performance gaps to reach its $5.50 per barrel target.

Portfolio improvements include converting its San Francisco refinery to renewable fuels and closing the Los Angeles facility in 2025. This should enhance returns by focusing on higher-quality midcontinent and Gulf Coast refineries.

The company has expanded its midstream natural gas liquid business through acquisitions, creating an integrated value chain from production to market, which management believes drives value and growth.

Phillips 66’s chemical assets reside in CPChem, a 50/50 Chevron joint venture, with 80% of production capacity in the US and the Middle East, leveraging low-cost feedstocks. Growth will come from the Gulf Coast and Qatar projects expected in 2026.

Management is aiming for the nonrefining segments to generate $10 billion in EBITDA by 2027, representing two-thirds of the company’s total.

This strategy has faced challenges from Elliott Management, which argued the integrated model undervalues midstream and chemical businesses and advocates for a breakup—a strategy it successfully implemented at Marathon Petroleum, which subsequently delivered industry-leading returns. However, Elliott only placed two of its nominees on the board, suggesting the current strategy will not change. As such, it falls to management to execute on its plans and close the underperformance gap with peers Valero and Marathon.

Quanta Services

  • Number of Best Managers Selling the Stock: 6
  • Morningstar Rating: ★★
  • Morningstar Economic Moat Rating: None
  • Sector: Industrials

One of four 2-star names on the list, Quanta Services is trading 56% above its fair value estimate. This engineering and construction company falls in the large-growth segment of the style box.

Quanta Services is a leading specialty contractor serving customers across the utility, telecom, oil and gas, and renewable energy markets. The company operates through two segments: electric and underground utility and infrastructure.

The electric segment, which accounted for more than 80% of revenue in 2025, provides engineering and construction services for electric transmission and distribution networks, substations, power generation facilities, and large load centers. We expect this segment to benefit from rising electricity demand driven by artificial intelligence and data center expansion, electrification, and manufacturing reshoring. Meeting this demand will require significant investment in grid infrastructure to maintain reliable power delivery, which should support Quanta’s backlog. In addition, we believe the company is well positioned to benefit from the long-term trend toward greater outsourcing by electric utilities, particularly in distribution, where a meaningful portion of work continues to be performed in-house today. The renewable energy business is also housed within the electric segment and primarily composed of the company’s 2021 acquisition of Blattner, a leading EPC for wind and solar projects.

The underground utility and infrastructure segment includes gas utility, industrial, and oil and gas pipeline contracting services as well as work supporting customers that own or operate data centers. We expect this segment to represent a smaller share of revenue over time, as stronger growth opportunities across other areas of the portfolio drive a shift in mix.

Management has consistently used acquisitions to supplement organic growth and expand into new end markets. Most recently, Quanta broadened its capabilities in electrical and mechanical infrastructure for data centers through its acquisitions of Cupertino Electric in 2024 and Dynamic Systems in 2025. We view these acquisitions as establishing a new growth platform in a large addressable market that could support incremental earnings growth over the long run.

Datadog

  • Number of Best Managers Selling the Stock: 4
  • Morningstar Rating: ★★
  • Morningstar Economic Moat Rating: Wide
  • Sector: Technology

Datadog is one of five wide-moat stocks on the list of stocks that top managers have been selling. Morningstar thinks this large-growth stock is 18% overvalued.

Datadog is a premier software-as-a-service observability platform. “Observability” refers to the ability to assess a system’s current state using the data, or telemetry, it produces. Datadog’s observability solution deploys agents that run correlations across an enterprise’s technology platforms and then displays this telemetry in a single dashboard that surveys its entire technological infrastructure.

Despite occasional investor anxiety about how artificial intelligence will affect software models, we believe the observability industry has upside potential given the explosion of telemetry from disparate tools in enterprise technology stacks.

As companies increasingly adopt and build cloud and AI-based applications, their technological architecture and systems become more complex. There are more applications to manage, more servers in use, more data being generated, and more agents operating across the technology stack. Users, such as technology professionals or engineers, need access to telemetry to understand what’s going on. Datadog’s software creates a unified infrastructure that makes sense of complex enterprise technologies, thanks to its taxonomy—a consistent classification system—and its topology, or dependency-mapping system.

Datadog’s main competitor in the observability market is Dynatrace, but the two companies have historically targeted different customer segments. Dynatrace focuses solely on the largest companies, while Datadog has over 30,000 customers, mostly small and midsize. Datadog intends to move upstream, but it needs to demonstrate that its time-to-resolution can match Dynatrace’s to capture some customers. Datadog has also built a popular developer network with a quick feedback loop that enables product-led growth, which we find appealing.

We expect the total spending on cloud services, which include IaaS and SaaS applications, to reach nearly $1.25 trillion by 2028 (a roughly 20% annual growth rate from 2024). In this growing and data-rich environment, customers will be attracted to software that enables efficiency and increases the reliability of services, which is exactly what Datadog does.

Cadence Design Systems

  • Number of Best Managers Selling the Stock: 6
  • Morningstar Rating: ★★★
  • Morningstar Economic Moat Rating: Wide
  • Sector: Technology

Software application firm Cadence Design Systems is one of four large-growth names on the list. Morningstar thinks shares of this stock are 9% undervalued.

Cadence Design Systems is a leading provider of electronic design automation software used by engineers to design semiconductor chips. EDA solutions are indispensable to major semiconductor design firms and a growing number of electronic systems companies that design products that use semiconductors, such as modern automobiles. The semiconductor industry does not function without companies like Cadence in the background.

Cadence is one of three major EDA players, along with Synopsys and Siemens EDA. Cadence is historically stronger in the analog space, whereas Synopsys has historically been more dominant in the digital space. But Cadence in particular has increased its share in digital workflows over the years.

Cadence has three business segments: core EDA, intellectual property, and system design and analysis. We believe the outlook is strong for all three. Demand for EDA tools is set to grow significantly over the next decade as artificial intelligence demand, design starts, and chip complexity in general (such as multi-die and chiplet architectures) increase, and as nonsemiconductor firms that use semiconductors in their products increasingly use EDA tools. We also see Cadence monetizing the productivity and performance results that its AI tools provide.

The intellectual property segment sells predesigned chip components. We expect above-average growth here as well, as the industry needs prebuilt IP blocks to speed up the design process and focus efforts on areas where design can be differentiated.

We like how Cadence is positioned in system design and analysis, as it has developed many of its key simulation and systems design tools in-house. We think this is the future of the industry, as EDA tools and high-end design needs proliferate beyond the core semiconductor industry.

From a strategic perspective, we think Cadence will see above-average growth from its systems strategy. Its focus on innovation, such as its improved AI offerings, should serve it well. Cadence should remain a dominant force in the industry for years to come, while margins gradually increase with growing revenue.

Boston Scientific

  • Number of Best Managers Selling the Stock: 6
  • Morningstar Rating: ★★★★
  • Morningstar Economic Moat Rating: Narrow
  • Sector: Healthcare

Boston Scientific rounds out the list of stocks that top fund managers have been selling. Morningstar thinks shares of this stock are 21% undervalued.

Boston Scientific has proved to be a fierce competitor among the three major cardiac device makers, with a record of meaningful innovation and impressive operational chops. Even a prolonged period of operational and management upheaval from 2006 to 2014 wasn’t enough to permanently impair Boston’s underlying business or the organization’s ability to develop and commercialize new technology platforms. Under CEO Michael Mahoney, the firm has focused on introducing novel technology, accelerating growth, and leveraging its historically formidable sales and marketing resources.

In the last decade, Boston has materially reduced its reliance on traditional cardiac rhythm management and coronary stents, which are mature markets at this point, and has focused on new technologies in underpenetrated markets. Boston has tapped into novel platforms, including its subcutaneous implantable defibrillator, left atrial appendage closure, and atrial fibrillation ablation products. The firm has also acquired adjacent technologies that open the door for it to compete in underpenetrated markets, including sacral neuromodulation for incontinence and peripheral mechanical thrombectomy. Despite trailing Medtronic on cardiac rhythm management, Boston remains in the game there with launches of comparable technologies and respectable market share.

Like other device firms, Boston has also seen some disappointments, especially in the structural heart area. This includes its Lotus transcatheter aortic valve and more recently the discontinuation of its Acurate Neo product. Nonetheless, we think Boston’s extensive and differentiated product portfolio in electrophysiology, endoscopy, urology, and vascular offer growth opportunities. The big question is whether Boston’s wide-ranging presence across device categories will be enough to maintain its competitive position, especially as rivals (including Medtronic, Stryker, Johnson & Johnson, and Abbott) seek further consolidation to solidify their place as hospital vendors.

How do we determine which stocks top managers are selling?

To determine which stocks top managers are selling, we compared the latest portfolios of these funds with their portfolios three months before. We then calculated a “sell score” for each stock, which is a weighted average that allows us to make apples-to-apples comparisons of the most-sold stocks. One or two managers making large sales of a stock could lead to the same sell score as many managers selling small amounts of a stock.