The 700+ hedge funds and money managers tracked by Insider Monkey have already compiled and submitted their 13F filings for the third quarter, which unveil their equity positions as of September 30. We went through these filings, fixed typos and other more significant errors and identified the changes in hedge fund positions. Our extensive review of these public filings is finally over, so this article is set to reveal the smart money sentiment towards AtriCure Inc. (NASDAQ:ATRC).
Is AtriCure Inc. (NASDAQ:ATRC) a healthy stock for your portfolio? Money managers are actually getting more optimistic. The number of long hedge fund investments advanced by 2 in recent months. There were 17 hedge funds in our database with ATRC holdings at the end of the third 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 Armstrong Flooring Inc (NYSE:AFI), World Point Terminals LP (NYSE:WPT), and PGT, Inc. (NASDAQ:PGTI) to gather more data points.
Follow Atricure Inc. (NASDAQ:ATRC)
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At Insider Monkey, we’ve developed an investment strategy that has delivered market-beating returns over the past 12 months. Our strategy identifies the 100 best-performing funds of the previous quarter from among the collection of 700+ successful funds that we track in our database, which we accomplish using our returns methodology. We then study the portfolios of those 100 funds using the latest 13F data to uncover the 30 most popular mid-cap stocks (market caps of between $1 billion and $10 billion) among them to hold until the next filing period. This strategy delivered 18% gains over the past 12 months, more than doubling the 8% returns enjoyed by the S&P 500 ETFs.
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Keeping this in mind, we’re going to analyze the recent action encompassing AtriCure Inc. (NASDAQ:ATRC).
Hedge fund activity in AtriCure Inc. (NASDAQ:ATRC)
At Q3’s end, a total of 17 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were long this stock, up 13% from the previous quarter. On the other hand, there were a total of 15 hedge funds with a bullish position in ATRC at the beginning of this year. With hedgies’ capital changing hands, there exists an “upper tier” of noteworthy hedge fund managers who were increasing their holdings significantly (or already accumulated large positions).
According to publicly available hedge fund and institutional investor holdings data compiled by Insider Monkey, Israel Englander’s Millennium Management holds the largest position in AtriCure Inc. (NASDAQ:ATRC). The fund reportedly has a $9 million position in the stock. The second largest stake is held by Nathan Fischel of DAFNA Capital Management, with an $8.4 million position; 5.8% of its 13F portfolio is allocated to the company. Some other hedge funds and institutional investors that are bullish comprise Chuck Royce’s Royce & Associates, George McCabe’s Portolan Capital Management and Mitchell Blutt’s Consonance Capital Management. We should note that none of these hedge funds are among our list of the 100 best performing hedge funds which is based on the performance of their 13F long positions in non-microcap stocks.
With a general bullishness amongst the heavyweights, some big names have jumped into AtriCure Inc. (NASDAQ:ATRC) headfirst. George McCabe’s Portolan Capital Management established the biggest position in AtriCure Inc. (NASDAQ:ATRC). According to regulatory filings, the fund had $3.9 million invested in the company at the end of the quarter. Consonance Capital Management also made a $3.7 million fresh investment in the stock during the quarter. The other funds with new positions in the stock are Thomas E. Claugus’ GMT Capital, Ken Griffin’s Citadel Investment Group, and Joseph Edelman’s Perceptive Advisors.
Let’s go over hedge fund activity in other stocks similar to AtriCure Inc. (NASDAQ:ATRC). These stocks are Armstrong Flooring Inc (NYSE:AFI), World Point Terminals LP (NYSE:WPT), PGT, Inc. (NASDAQ:PGTI), and Omega Protein Corporation (NYSE:OME). This group of stocks’ market values match ATRC’s market value.
| Ticker | No of HFs with positions | Total Value of HF Positions (x1000) | Change in HF Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| AFI | 15 | 216726 | -1 |
| WPT | 3 | 18183 | -1 |
| PGTI | 14 | 73165 | 1 |
| OME | 17 | 60319 | 3 |
As you can see these stocks had an average of 12 hedge funds with bullish positions and the average amount invested in these stocks was $92 million. That figure was $44 million in ATRC’s case. Omega Protein Corporation (NYSE:OME) is the most popular stock in this table. On the other hand World Point Terminals LP (NYSE:WPT) is the least popular one with only 3 bullish hedge fund positions. AtriCure Inc. (NASDAQ:ATRC) is not the most popular stock in this group but hedge fund interest is still above average. This is a slightly positive signal but we’d rather spend our time researching stocks that hedge funds are piling on. In this regard OME might be a better candidate to consider taking a long position in.
Disclosure: None
