Did Hedge Funds Make The Right Call On Equity Lifestyle Properties, Inc. (ELS) ?

The latest 13F reporting period has come and gone, and Insider Monkey have plowed through 821 13F filings that hedge funds and well-known value investors are required to file by the SEC. The 13F filings show the funds’ and investors’ portfolio positions as of March 31st, a week after the market trough. Now, we are almost done with the second quarter. Investors decided to bet on the economic recovery and a stock market rebound. S&P 500 Index returned almost 20% this quarter. In this article you are going to find out whether hedge funds thoughtEquity Lifestyle Properties, Inc. (NYSE:ELS) was a good investment heading into the second quarter and how the stock traded in comparison to the top hedge fund picks.

Equity Lifestyle Properties, Inc. (NYSE:ELS) shareholders have witnessed an increase in support from the world’s most elite money managers recently. Our calculations also showed that ELS isn’t among the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds (click for Q1 rankings and see the video for a quick look at the top 5 stocks).

Video: Watch our video about the top 5 most popular hedge fund stocks.

According to most stock holders, hedge funds are assumed to be underperforming, outdated financial vehicles of the past. While there are over 8000 funds with their doors open at present, We hone in on the upper echelon of this group, around 850 funds. Most estimates calculate that this group of people direct most of all hedge funds’ total capital, and by paying attention to their best picks, Insider Monkey has unearthed a number of investment strategies that have historically outperformed the market. Insider Monkey’s flagship short hedge fund strategy exceeded the S&P 500 short ETFs by around 20 percentage points per year since its inception in March 2017. Our portfolio of short stocks lost 36% since February 2017 (through May 18th) even though the market was up 30% during the same period. We just shared a list of 8 short targets in our latest quarterly update .

Jim Simons of Renaissance Technologies

At Insider Monkey we scour multiple sources to uncover the next great investment idea. We read hedge fund investor letters and listen to stock pitches at hedge fund conferences. Hedge fund sentiment towards Tesla reached its all time high at the end of 2019 and Tesla shares more than tripled this year. We are trying to identify other EV revolution winners, so we are checking out this tiny lithium stock. Keeping this in mind let’s take a look at the key hedge fund action surrounding Equity Lifestyle Properties, Inc. (NYSE:ELS).

What have hedge funds been doing with Equity Lifestyle Properties, Inc. (NYSE:ELS)?

At Q1’s end, a total of 31 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were bullish on this stock, a change of 35% from one quarter earlier. Below, you can check out the change in hedge fund sentiment towards ELS over the last 18 quarters. So, let’s find out which hedge funds were among the top holders of the stock and which hedge funds were making big moves.

Of the funds tracked by Insider Monkey, Renaissance Technologies has the largest position in Equity Lifestyle Properties, Inc. (NYSE:ELS), worth close to $287.6 million, accounting for 0.3% of its total 13F portfolio. On Renaissance Technologies’s heels is Waratah Capital Advisors, led by Brad Dunkley and Blair Levinsky, holding a $48.2 million position; 8.6% of its 13F portfolio is allocated to the company. Other hedge funds and institutional investors with similar optimism comprise Israel Englander’s Millennium Management, Noam Gottesman’s GLG Partners and Murray Stahl’s Horizon Asset Management. In terms of the portfolio weights assigned to each position Waratah Capital Advisors allocated the biggest weight to Equity Lifestyle Properties, Inc. (NYSE:ELS), around 8.57% of its 13F portfolio. LDR Capital is also relatively very bullish on the stock, setting aside 6.45 percent of its 13F equity portfolio to ELS.

Now, some big names were breaking ground themselves. Balyasny Asset Management, managed by Dmitry Balyasny, initiated the largest position in Equity Lifestyle Properties, Inc. (NYSE:ELS). Balyasny Asset Management had $8.4 million invested in the company at the end of the quarter. Lawrence Raiman’s LDR Capital also made a $3.7 million investment in the stock during the quarter. The other funds with new positions in the stock are Ryan Tolkin (CIO)’s Schonfeld Strategic Advisors, Minhua Zhang’s Weld Capital Management, and Mark Coe’s Intrinsic Edge Capital.

Let’s check out hedge fund activity in other stocks similar to Equity Lifestyle Properties, Inc. (NYSE:ELS). These stocks are DISH Network Corp. (NASDAQ:DISH), POSCO (NYSE:PKX), Vipshop Holdings Limited (NYSE:VIPS), and Burlington Stores Inc (NYSE:BURL). This group of stocks’ market values resemble ELS’s market value.

View table here if you experience formatting issues.

As you can see these stocks had an average of 31.25 hedge funds with bullish positions and the average amount invested in these stocks was $599 million. That figure was $452 million in ELS’s case. DISH Network Corp. (NASDAQ:DISH) is the most popular stock in this table. On the other hand POSCO (NYSE:PKX) is the least popular one with only 11 bullish hedge fund positions. Equity Lifestyle Properties, Inc. (NYSE:ELS) is not the least popular stock in this group but hedge fund interest is still below average. 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 10 most popular stocks among hedge funds returned 41.4% in 2019 and outperformed the S&P 500 ETF (SPY) by 10.1 percentage points. These stocks gained 12.3% in 2020 through June 30th and surpassed the market by 15.5 percentage points. Unfortunately ELS wasn’t nearly as popular as these 10 stocks (hedge fund sentiment was quite bearish); ELS investors were disappointed as the stock returned 9.3% during the second quarter and underperformed the market. If you are interested in investing in large cap stocks with huge upside potential, you should check out the top 10 most popular stocks among hedge funds as most of these stocks already outperformed the market in 2020.

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