The latest 13F reporting period has come and gone, and Insider Monkey is again at the forefront when it comes to making use of this gold mine of data. We have processed the filings of the more than 866 world-class investment firms that we track and now have access to the collective wisdom contained in these filings, which are based on their March 31st holdings, data that is available nowhere else. Should you consider Columbia Sportswear Company (NASDAQ:COLM) for your portfolio? We’ll look to this invaluable collective wisdom for the answer.
Columbia Sportswear Company (NASDAQ:COLM) was in 21 hedge funds’ portfolios at the end of March. The all time high for this statistic is 32. COLM investors should pay attention to an increase in enthusiasm from smart money in recent months. There were 14 hedge funds in our database with COLM positions at the end of the fourth quarter. Our calculations also showed that COLM isn’t among the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds (click for Q1 rankings).
Hedge funds’ reputation as shrewd investors has been tarnished in the last decade as their hedged returns couldn’t keep up with the unhedged returns of the market indices. Hedge funds have more than $3.5 trillion in assets under management, so you can’t expect their entire portfolios to beat the market by large margins. Our research was able to identify in advance a select group of hedge fund holdings that outperformed the S&P 500 ETFs by more than 115 percentage points since March 2017 (see the details here). So you can still find a lot of gems by following hedge funds’ moves today.
Dmitry Balyasny of Balyasny Asset Management
At Insider Monkey, we scour multiple sources to uncover the next great investment idea. For example, Chuck Schumer recently stated that marijuana legalization will be a Senate priority. So, we are checking out this under the radar stock that will benefit from this. We go through lists like the 10 best battery stocks to pick the next Tesla that will deliver a 10x return. Even though we recommend positions in only a tiny fraction of the companies we analyze, we check out as many stocks as we can. We read hedge fund investor letters and listen to stock pitches at hedge fund conferences. You can subscribe to our free daily newsletter on our homepage. Keeping this in mind we’re going to take a gander at the new hedge fund action encompassing Columbia Sportswear Company (NASDAQ:COLM).
Do Hedge Funds Think COLM Is A Good Stock To Buy Now?
At Q1’s end, a total of 21 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were bullish on this stock, a change of 50% from one quarter earlier. The graph below displays the number of hedge funds with bullish position in COLM over the last 23 quarters. So, let’s see which hedge funds were among the top holders of the stock and which hedge funds were making big moves.
According to publicly available hedge fund and institutional investor holdings data compiled by Insider Monkey, Peter Rathjens, Bruce Clarke and John Campbell’s Arrowstreet Capital has the most valuable position in Columbia Sportswear Company (NASDAQ:COLM), worth close to $39.8 million, corresponding to 0.1% of its total 13F portfolio. Sitting at the No. 2 spot is AQR Capital Management, led by Cliff Asness, holding a $29.2 million position; less than 0.1%% of its 13F portfolio is allocated to the company. Some other professional money managers that hold long positions contain Israel Englander’s Millennium Management, Richard Scott Greeder’s Broad Bay Capital and Paul Marshall and Ian Wace’s Marshall Wace LLP. In terms of the portfolio weights assigned to each position Broad Bay Capital allocated the biggest weight to Columbia Sportswear Company (NASDAQ:COLM), around 1.98% of its 13F portfolio. Running Oak Capital is also relatively very bullish on the stock, earmarking 1.9 percent of its 13F equity portfolio to COLM.
With a general bullishness amongst the heavyweights, some big names were breaking ground themselves. Impax Asset Management, managed by Ian Simm, assembled the largest position in Columbia Sportswear Company (NASDAQ:COLM). Impax Asset Management had $8.4 million invested in the company at the end of the quarter. Dmitry Balyasny’s Balyasny Asset Management also made a $6.6 million investment in the stock during the quarter. The following funds were also among the new COLM investors: Ray Dalio’s Bridgewater Associates, Greg Eisner’s Engineers Gate Manager, and John Overdeck and David Siegel’s Two Sigma Advisors.
Let’s also examine hedge fund activity in other stocks similar to Columbia Sportswear Company (NASDAQ:COLM). These stocks are Toll Brothers Inc (NYSE:TOL), Prosperity Bancshares, Inc. (NYSE:PB), MasTec, Inc. (NYSE:MTZ), Mattel, Inc. (NASDAQ:MAT), Grupo Aval Acciones y Valores S.A. (NYSE:AVAL), Ascendis Pharma A/S (NASDAQ:ASND), and TopBuild Corp (NYSE:BLD). This group of stocks’ market valuations are closest to COLM’s market valuation.
| Ticker | No of HFs with positions | Total Value of HF Positions (x1000) | Change in HF Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| TOL | 30 | 699227 | -4 |
| PB | 21 | 96958 | 5 |
| MTZ | 36 | 334673 | 4 |
| MAT | 25 | 872671 | 0 |
| AVAL | 5 | 9921 | 1 |
| ASND | 28 | 2078115 | -3 |
| BLD | 18 | 103995 | -1 |
| Average | 23.3 | 599366 | 0.3 |
View table here if you experience formatting issues.
As you can see these stocks had an average of 23.3 hedge funds with bullish positions and the average amount invested in these stocks was $599 million. That figure was $185 million in COLM’s case. MasTec, Inc. (NYSE:MTZ) is the most popular stock in this table. On the other hand Grupo Aval Acciones y Valores S.A. (NYSE:AVAL) is the least popular one with only 5 bullish hedge fund positions. Columbia Sportswear Company (NASDAQ:COLM) is not the least popular stock in this group but hedge fund interest is still below average. Our overall hedge fund sentiment score for COLM is 55.5. Stocks with higher number of hedge fund positions relative to other stocks as well as relative to their historical range receive a higher sentiment score. This is a slightly negative signal and we’d rather spend our time researching stocks that hedge funds are piling on. Our calculations showed that top 5 most popular stocks among hedge funds returned 95.8% in 2019 and 2020, and outperformed the S&P 500 ETF (SPY) by 40 percentage points. These stocks gained 23.8% in 2021 through July 16th and surpassed the market again by 7.7 percentage points. Unfortunately COLM wasn’t nearly as popular as these 5 stocks (hedge fund sentiment was quite bearish); COLM investors were disappointed as the stock returned -7% since the end of March (through 7/16) and underperformed the market. If you are interested in investing in large cap stocks with huge upside potential, you should check out the top 5 most popular stocks among hedge funds as most of these stocks already outperformed the market in 2021.
Follow Columbia Sportswear Co (NASDAQ:COLM)
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Disclosure: None. This article was originally published at Insider Monkey.
