Cushman & Wakefield plc (CWK): Hedge Funds Are Snapping Up

At Insider Monkey, we pore over the filings of nearly 873 top investment firms every quarter, a process we have now completed for the latest reporting period. The data we’ve gathered as a result gives us access to a wealth of collective knowledge based on these firms’ portfolio holdings as of June 30th. In this article, we will use that wealth of knowledge to determine whether or not Cushman & Wakefield plc (NYSE:CWK) makes for a good investment right now.

Cushman & Wakefield plc (NYSE:CWK) shareholders have witnessed an increase in activity from the world’s largest hedge funds of late. Cushman & Wakefield plc (NYSE:CWK) was in 23 hedge funds’ portfolios at the end of June. The all time high for this statistic is 26. There were 19 hedge funds in our database with CWK holdings at the end of March. Our calculations also showed that CWK isn’t among the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds (click for Q2 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 79 percentage points since March 2017 (see the details here). So you can still find a lot of gems by following hedge funds’ moves today.

Peter Rathjens of Arrowstreet Capital

At Insider Monkey, we scour multiple sources to uncover the next great investment idea. For example, lithium mining is one of the fastest growing industries right now, so we are checking out stock pitches like this emerging lithium stock. We go through lists like the 10 best EV 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. Now we’re going to take a glance at the new hedge fund action regarding Cushman & Wakefield plc (NYSE:CWK).

Do Hedge Funds Think CWK Is A Good Stock To Buy Now?

At second quarter’s end, a total of 23 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey held long positions in this stock, a change of 21% from the first quarter of 2020. On the other hand, there were a total of 17 hedge funds with a bullish position in CWK a year ago. With the smart money’s capital changing hands, there exists a select group of key hedge fund managers who were adding to their stakes substantially (or already accumulated large positions).

According to publicly available hedge fund and institutional investor holdings data compiled by Insider Monkey, Millennium Management, managed by Israel Englander, holds the biggest position in Cushman & Wakefield plc (NYSE:CWK). Millennium Management has a $55.1 million position in the stock, comprising less than 0.1%% of its 13F portfolio. The second most bullish fund manager is Anthony Bozza of Lakewood Capital Management, with a $51 million position; 2.1% of its 13F portfolio is allocated to the company. Some other professional money managers with similar optimism encompass Peter Rathjens, Bruce Clarke and John Campbell’s Arrowstreet Capital, Dmitry Balyasny’s Balyasny Asset Management and Will Cook’s Sunriver Management. In terms of the portfolio weights assigned to each position Sunriver Management allocated the biggest weight to Cushman & Wakefield plc (NYSE:CWK), around 3.83% of its 13F portfolio. Lakewood Capital Management is also relatively very bullish on the stock, earmarking 2.11 percent of its 13F equity portfolio to CWK.

As one would reasonably expect, key hedge funds have been driving this bullishness. Tudor Investment Corp, managed by Paul Tudor Jones, established the biggest position in Cushman & Wakefield plc (NYSE:CWK). Tudor Investment Corp had $6.4 million invested in the company at the end of the quarter. Frank Fu’s CaaS Capital also made a $5.4 million investment in the stock during the quarter. The other funds with new positions in the stock are Michael Gelband’s ExodusPoint Capital, Ken Griffin’s Citadel Investment Group, and David Costen Haley’s HBK Investments.

Let’s now review hedge fund activity in other stocks similar to Cushman & Wakefield plc (NYSE:CWK). We will take a look at Ormat Technologies, Inc. (NYSE:ORA), Freedom Holding Corp. (NASDAQ:FRHC), National Storage Affiliates Trust (NYSE:NSA), Ambarella Inc (NASDAQ:AMBA), Aerojet Rocketdyne Holdings Inc (NYSE:AJRD), Schneider National, Inc. (NYSE:SNDR), and Hancock Whitney Corporation (NASDAQ:HWC). This group of stocks’ market caps match CWK’s market cap.

View table here if you experience formatting issues.

As you can see these stocks had an average of 23.1 hedge funds with bullish positions and the average amount invested in these stocks was $279 million. That figure was $245 million in CWK’s case. Ambarella Inc (NASDAQ:AMBA) is the most popular stock in this table. On the other hand Freedom Holding Corp. (NASDAQ:FRHC) is the least popular one with only 13 bullish hedge fund positions. Cushman & Wakefield plc (NYSE:CWK) is not the least popular stock in this group but hedge fund interest is still below average. Our overall hedge fund sentiment score for CWK is 56.4. 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. 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 24% in 2021 through October 22nd and still beat the market by 1.6 percentage points. A small number of hedge funds were also right about betting on CWK as the stock returned 6.5% since the end of the second quarter (through 10/22) and outperformed the market by an even larger margin.

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Disclosure: None. This article was originally published at Insider Monkey.