What’s a smart CVB Financial Corp. (NASDAQ:CVBF) investor to do?
To many investors, hedge funds are viewed as useless, old financial tools of a forgotten age. Although there are over 8,000 hedge funds in operation today, this site looks at the leaders of this club, around 525 funds. It is assumed that this group has its hands on the majority of the smart money’s total assets, and by monitoring their best equity investments, we’ve unsheathed a number of investment strategies that have historically outpaced Mr. Market. Our small-cap hedge fund strategy outpaced the S&P 500 index by 18 percentage points a year for a decade in our back tests, and since we’ve began to sharing our picks with our subscribers at the end of August 2012, we have outperformed the S&P 500 index by 33 percentage points in 11 months (see all of our picks from August).
Just as key, optimistic insider trading sentiment is a second way to analyze the financial markets. As the old adage goes: there are many motivations for a bullish insider to cut shares of his or her company, but just one, very clear reason why they would behave bullishly. Plenty of academic studies have demonstrated the valuable potential of this method if investors understand what to do (learn more here).
Keeping this in mind, it’s important to discuss the recent info for CVB Financial Corp. (NASDAQ:CVBF).
How are hedge funds trading CVB Financial Corp. (NASDAQ:CVBF)?
Heading into Q3, a total of 8 of the hedge funds we track were long in this stock, a change of 0% from one quarter earlier. With hedge funds’ positions undergoing their usual ebb and flow, there exists a select group of key hedge fund managers who were upping their holdings considerably.
As CVB Financial Corp. (NASDAQ:CVBF) has experienced bearish sentiment from the top-tier hedge fund industry, we can see that there exists a select few funds who sold off their positions entirely last quarter. Interestingly, Matthew Tewksbury’s Stevens Capital Management said goodbye to the largest position of all the hedgies we track, worth about $1 million in stock. David Costen Haley’s fund, HBK Investments, also sold off its stock, about $0.2 million worth. These bearish behaviors are interesting, as total hedge fund interest stayed the same (this is a bearish signal in our experience).
How have insiders been trading CVB Financial Corp. (NASDAQ:CVBF)?
Insider buying made by high-level executives is particularly usable when the company in focus has experienced transactions within the past 180 days. Over the latest 180-day time period, CVB Financial Corp. (NASDAQ:CVBF) has experienced zero unique insiders buying, and zero insider sales (see the details of insider trades here).
We’ll check out the relationship between both of these indicators in other stocks similar to CVB Financial Corp. (NASDAQ:CVBF). These stocks are Glacier Bancorp, Inc. (NASDAQ:GBCI), BBCN Bancorp, Inc. (NASDAQ:BBCN), PacWest Bancorp (NASDAQ:PACW), WestAmerica Bancorp. (NASDAQ:WABC), and Western Alliance Bancorporation (NYSE:WAL). All of these stocks are in the regional – pacific banks industry and their market caps resemble CVBF’s market cap.
