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 successful funds in these small-cap stocks. In the following paragraphs, we analyze CTI BioPharma Corp (NASDAQ:CTIC) from the perspective of those successful funds.
Is CTI BioPharma Corp (NASDAQ:CTIC) a worthy stock to buy now? Hedge funds seem to be taking a bearish view. Among the funds in our database, the number of bullish hedge fund investments inched down by one during 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 Energy Fuels Inc Ordinary Shares (Canada) (NYSEMKT:UUUU), Neos Therapeutics Inc (NASDAQ:NEOS), and Taseko Mines Limited (USA) (NYSEAMEX:TGB) to gather more data points.
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, let’s view the latest action regarding CTI BioPharma Corp (NASDAQ:CTIC).
How have hedgies been trading CTI BioPharma Corp (NASDAQ:CTIC)?
At Q3’s end, a total of eight of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were bullish on this stock, down by 11% from the previous quarter. On the other hand, there were a total of 11 hedge funds with a bullish position in CTIC at the beginning of this year. With hedge funds’ sentiment swirling, there exists a few key hedge fund managers who were boosting their stakes considerably (or already accumulated large positions).
Of the funds tracked by Insider Monkey, Mark Lampert’s Biotechnology Value Fund / BVF Inc holds the most valuable position in CTI BioPharma Corp (NASDAQ:CTIC). Biotechnology Value Fund / BVF Inc has a $16.8 million position in the stock, comprising 3.2% of its 13F portfolio. Sitting at the No. 2 spot is Renaissance Technologies, one of the largest hedge funds in the world, holding a $0.7 million position. Some other professional money managers that are bullish consist of Israel Englander’s Millennium Management, Cliff Asness’ AQR Capital Management, and D. E. Shaw’s D E Shaw. 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.
