Centene Corp (CNC): Smart Money Ownership Crumbles by 53% in 2 Quarters

Legendary investors such as Leon Cooperman and Seth Klarman earn enormous amounts of money for themselves and their investors by doing in-depth research on small-cap stocks that big brokerage houses don’t publish. Small cap stocks -especially when they are screened well- can generate substantial outperformance versus a boring index fund. That’s why we analyze the activity of those elite funds in these small-cap stocks. In the following paragraphs, we analyze Centene Corp (NYSE:CNC) from the perspective of those elite funds.

Is Centene Corp (NYSE:CNC) a great stock to buy now? The smart money is selling. The number of bullish hedge fund positions went down by 10 lately. CNC was in 22 hedge funds’ portfolios at the end of the third quarter of 2016. There were 32 hedge funds in our database with CNC holdings at the end of the previous quarter. At the end of this article we will also compare CNC to other stocks including Tractor Supply Company (NASDAQ:TSCO), Autodesk, Inc. (NASDAQ:ADSK), and Host Hotels and Resorts Inc (NYSE:HST) to get a better sense of its popularity.

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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Hedge fund activity in Centene Corp (NYSE:CNC)

At Q3’s end, a total of 22 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were bullish on this stock, a 31% tumble from one quarter earlier, with smart money holdings falling by over 53% in the past 2 quarters. With the smart money’s positions undergoing their usual ebb and flow, there exists an “upper tier” of key hedge fund managers who were upping their holdings considerably (or already accumulated large positions).

According to Insider Monkey’s hedge fund database, Andreas Halvorsen’s Viking Global has the largest position in Centene Corp (NYSE:CNC), worth close to $54.7 million. Coming in second is GMT Capital, managed by Thomas E. Claugus, which holds a $50.4 million position; 1% of its 13F portfolio is allocated to the stock. Some other professional money managers that are bullish consist of Jeremy Green’s Redmile Group, Phill Gross and Robert Atchinson’s Adage Capital Management and Roberto Mignone’s Bridger Management.