Do Hedge Funds and Insiders Love Oneok Partners LP (OKS)?

Oneok Partners LP (NYSE:OKS) has experienced an increase in hedge fund sentiment lately.

If you’d ask most stock holders, hedge funds are viewed as unimportant, old financial tools of the past. While there are over 8000 funds with their doors open today, we at Insider Monkey choose to focus on the leaders of this club, about 450 funds. It is widely believed that this group has its hands on most of the smart money’s total asset base, and by paying attention to their top picks, we have found a few investment strategies that have historically outpaced the market. Our small-cap hedge fund strategy beat the S&P 500 index by 18 percentage points annually 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 trumped the S&P 500 index by 24 percentage points in 7 months (explore the details and some picks here).

Equally as integral, optimistic insider trading activity is a second way to parse down the marketplace. As the old adage goes: there are many stimuli for a corporate insider to cut shares of his or her company, but only one, very simple reason why they would behave bullishly. Plenty of academic studies have demonstrated the market-beating potential of this method if piggybackers understand what to do (learn more here).

Now, it’s important to take a peek at the latest action surrounding Oneok Partners LP (NYSE:OKS).

Hedge fund activity in Oneok Partners LP (NYSE:OKS)

At the end of the fourth quarter, a total of 5 of the hedge funds we track held long positions in this stock, a change of 25% from one quarter earlier. With the smart money’s sentiment swirling, there exists a few noteworthy hedge fund managers who were upping their holdings substantially.

Of the funds we track, Jim Simons’s Renaissance Technologies had the biggest position in Oneok Partners LP (NYSE:OKS), worth close to $16.5 million, accounting for less than 0.1%% of its total 13F portfolio. On Renaissance Technologies’s heels is Driehaus Capital, managed by Richard Driehaus, which held a $4.1 million position; the fund has 0.2% of its 13F portfolio invested in the stock. Some other peers with similar optimism include Ken Griffin’s Citadel Investment Group, Russell Lucas’s Lucas Capital Management and Cliff Asness’s AQR Capital Management.

As industrywide interest jumped, specific money managers have jumped into Oneok Partners LP (NYSE:OKS) headfirst. Driehaus Capital, managed by Richard Driehaus, initiated the biggest position in Oneok Partners LP (NYSE:OKS). Driehaus Capital had 4.1 million invested in the company at the end of the quarter.

How are insiders trading Oneok Partners LP (NYSE:OKS)?

Insider trading activity, especially when it’s bullish, is at its handiest when the company in question has experienced transactions within the past six months. Over the latest half-year time period, Oneok Partners LP (NYSE:OKS) has experienced 1 unique insiders buying, and zero insider sales (see the details of insider trades here).

Let’s also review hedge fund and insider activity in other stocks similar to Oneok Partners LP (NYSE:OKS). These stocks are El Paso Pipeline Partners, L.P. (NYSE:EPB), Energy Transfer Equity, L.P. (NYSE:ETE), Kinder Morgan Management, LLC (NYSE:KMR), Energy Transfer Partners LP (NYSE:ETP), and Magellan Midstream Partners, L.P. (NYSE:MMP). All of these stocks are in the oil & gas pipelines industry and their market caps are similar to OKS’s market cap.

With the returns shown by Insider Monkey’s studies, retail investors should always monitor hedge fund and insider trading activity, and Oneok Partners LP (NYSE:OKS) is an important part of this process.

Click here to learn why you should track hedge funds