Are Hedge Funds Dumping VSE Corporation (VSEC)?

Hedge Funds and other institutional investors have just completed filing their 13Fs with the Securities and Exchange Commission, revealing their equity portfolios as of the end of September. At Insider Monkey, we follow over 700 of the best-performing investors and by analyzing their 13F filings, we can determine the stocks that they are collectively bullish on. One of their picks is VSE Corporation (NASDAQ:VSEC), so let’s take a closer look at the sentiment that surrounds it in the current quarter.

VSE Corporation (NASDAQ:VSEC) was in 5 hedge funds’ portfolios at the end of the third quarter of 2015. VSEC has experienced a decrease in activity from the world’s largest hedge funds in recent months. There were 6 hedge funds in our database with VSEC positions at the end of the previous quarter. The level and the change in hedge fund popularity aren’t the only variables you need to analyze to decipher hedge funds’ perspectives. A stock may witness a boost in popularity but it may still be less popular than similarly priced stocks. That’s why at the end of this article we will examine companies such as Ivy High Income Opportunities Fund (NYSE:IVH), vTv Therapeutics Inc (NASDAQ:VTVT), and CAI International Inc (NYSE:CAI) to gather more data points.

To most market participants, hedge funds are perceived as slow, outdated financial tools of years past. While there are over 8000 funds trading at the moment, Our researchers look at the top tier of this club, around 700 funds. These money managers manage most of the smart money’s total asset base, and by monitoring their unrivaled equity investments, Insider Monkey has figured out a number of investment strategies that have historically defeated the broader indices. Insider Monkey’s small-cap hedge fund strategy outstripped the S&P 500 index by 12 percentage points per annum for a decade in their back tests.

With all of this in mind, let’s take a look at the fresh action encompassing VSE Corporation (NASDAQ:VSEC).

How are hedge funds trading VSE Corporation (NASDAQ:VSEC)?

At Q3’s end, a total of 5 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey held long positions in this stock, a change of -17% from the second quarter. With hedgies’ sentiment swirling, there exists an “upper tier” of key hedge fund managers who were upping their stakes meaningfully (or already accumulated large positions).

According to publicly available hedge fund and institutional investor holdings data compiled by Insider Monkey, Jim Simons’s Renaissance Technologies has the number one position in VSE Corporation (NASDAQ:VSEC), worth close to $3.7 million, comprising less than 0.1%% of its total 13F portfolio. Coming in second is D. E. Shaw of D E Shaw, with an $0.8 million position; the fund has less than 0.1%% of its 13F portfolio invested in the stock. Other hedge funds and institutional investors that hold long positions consist of Israel Englander’s Millennium Management, John Overdeck and David Siegel’s Two Sigma Advisors and Cliff Asness’s AQR Capital Management.