By Brendan Conway

If it seems like Verizon (VZ ) is suddenly a big pick among top fund managers, what with Warren Buffett, Daniel Loeb and John Paulson each revealing stakes in Thursdays barrage of portfolio filings, well, thats because it suddenly is.

Verizon is one of the five most popular new holdings in hedge funds as of the end of the first quarter, according to Mazin Jadallah. manager of the AlphaClone Alternative Alpha ETF  (ALFA ), who ran the numbers on more than 250 hedge-fund firms for Barrons.com.

Bloomberg Hedge funds: First-quarter picks and pans.

But neither Buffett nor Loeb nor Paulson made the biggest new bet on Verizon during the period. That distinction falls to Lansdowne Partners and its position  valued at $641 million as of March 31, according to Alphaclone. (It was also the second-biggest new position in a single company by any hedge fund.)

Rounding out the top five of hedge funds most-heavily bought stocks in the first quarter are  Knowles Corp (KN ),  Perrigo (PRGO ),  Liberty Global Inc. (LBTYK ) and  Santander Consumer (SC ).

The biggest single new bet on any company was made by Carl Icahn. a $1.5 billion stake in eBay (EBAY ). Behind Lansdownes Verizon stake, Pershing Square Capital Managements new $635 million position in Platform Specialty Products (PAH ) was third biggest.

Now for the pans.

Both Buffett and David Einhorn gave the impression of less enthusiasm about General Motors (GM ), judging by their sale of the stock. This, too, turns out to be a first-quarter trend.

GM was the most oft-sold stock among hedge-fund managers, along with Apple (AAPL ), Time Warner Cable (TWC ), Vodafone (VOD ) and Brookfield Office (BPO ).

Hedge funds also seem to be moving away from smallcap stocks judging by their reductions in the iShares Russell 2000 ETF (IWM ), which fell from the 11th most popular holding in fall 2013 to the 18th most popular this time around. Either that, or, managers are getting more selective, and are less inclined to park their money in a broad ETF than in individual companies stocks.

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