Eric Bannasch‘s Cadian Capital has increased its stake in Workiva Inc (NYSE:WK) as it added some 2.09 million shares, according to a recent Schedule 13G form filed with the SEC. The new holding which comprises of 2.54 million shares represents 9.1% of the company’s outstanding common stock.
Cadian initiated a stake in Workiva Inc (NYSE:WK) in the fourth quarter with some 450,000 shares. The creator of Wdesk, which is a cloud based productivity platform enabling multiple users to easily link data in their complex reports, made its debut on NYSE in mid December last year. The platform is used by 65% of the Fortune 500 companies. Ken Griffin’s Citadel Investment Group holds about 1.27 million shares valued at $17.04 million, according to the latest 13F filing.
Founded in 2007, Cadian Capital has a unique investment strategy. The fund focuses on small and mid cap companies that are primarily concentrated in the technology and consumer discretionary sectors. The top three holdings, which are represented by Altera Corporation (NASDAQ:ALTR), Verint Systems Inc. (NASDAQ:VRNT), and Qlik Technologies Inc (NASDAQ:QLIK) constituted over 22% of the fund’s portfolio value. These stocks posted impressive results in the first quarter as they were up by nearly 7.94% on average, as compared to S&P 500’s 0.9% gain during the same period.
We like Cadian Capital and include it in our database for the diversity of small-cap long positions the fund maintains. Our extensive research has shown that the top 15 small-cap picks of the funds that we track, manage to significantly outperform the market. In our back tests the top small-cap stocks among hedge funds beat the market by an average of nearly a percentage point per month between 1999 and 2012. We have also started forward testing the performance of these stocks at the end of August 2012. Since then, this strategy has returned 132 percentage points through March 11, 2015 and beat the market by nearly 80 percentage points (see the details here).
Altera Corporation (NASDAQ:ALTR) is Cadian’s top holding with 8.34 million shares valued at $308.08 million. The stock of the $12.56 billion semiconductor company also advanced the most during the first quarter among the other top holdings, jumping by 16.79%. According to some sources, Intel Corporation (NASDAQ:INTC) has been in talks with Altera regarding a possible acquisition. Since many of Altera’s FPGAs (field-programmable gate array) are found in Intel’s processors, the deal is bound to create cost synergies and also help Intel diversify its revenues in the prevalent climate of low PC demand. Among over 700 hedge funds that we track, Boykin Curry‘s Eagle Capital Management holds the highest stake in Altera Corporation (NASDAQ:ALTR) with 10.54 million shares valued at $389.46 million.
The stock of Verint Systems Inc. (NASDAQ:VRNT), which represents Cadian’s second most valuable holding, appreciated by 6.26% during the first quarter, while the funds disclosed a $307.76 million position that contains 5.28 million shares. Focused on providing Actionable Intelligence solutions to more than 10,000 organizations operating in 180 different countries, Verint works in three major segments, namely Customer Engagement Optimization, Security Intelligence, and Fraud, Risk and Compliance. The company recently announced that it has significantly enhanced its Workforce Optimization solution and includes a wider range of analytics, a better interface, embedded voice biometrics technology, and improvement in methods to increase employee productivity using Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). A total of 30 hedge funds, among those that we track, had invested $634.21 million in Verint Systems Inc. (NASDAQ:VRNT) at the end of the fourth quarter as opposed to 31 funds with $762.04 million a quarter earlier. Andrew Feldstein and Stephen Siderow’s Blue Mountain Capital was one of these funds as it held some 1.42 million shares towards the end of 2014. Some analysts also view Verint as one of top three bets in the cloud computing space, especially in the area of big data analytics.
Qlik Technologies Inc (NASDAQ:QLIK) gained 0.78% during the first quarter. Bannasch decreased its stake in the technology company by 18% during the fourth quarter to 9.19 million shares valued at $283.89 million. Joy Lykouretzos’ Hoplite Capital Management is another significant shareholder of the $2.92 billion company with 2.6 million shares, according to its latest 13F filing. Qlik Technologies Inc (NASDAQ:QLIK) has also been placed in the Leaders Quadrant of the 2015 Business Intelligence and Analytics Platform Magic Quadrant report by Gartner Inc, according to an announcement made by the company in late February this year.
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