Do Hedge Funds and Insiders Love TFS Financial Corporation (TFSL)?

Should TFS Financial Corporation (NASDAQ:TFSL) investors track the following data?

To the average investor, there are a multitude of methods investors can use to analyze publicly traded companies. A pair of the most useful are hedge fund and insider trading sentiment. At Insider Monkey, our studies have shown that, historically, those who follow the best picks of the top money managers can trounce the market by a very impressive margin (see just how much).

Equally as crucial, optimistic insider trading activity is a second way to analyze the stock market universe. Just as you’d expect, there are many reasons for a corporate insider to cut shares of his or her company, but just one, very clear reason why they would initiate a purchase. Many empirical studies have demonstrated the valuable potential of this tactic if investors know what to do (learn more here).

Keeping this in mind, it’s important to study the newest info for TFS Financial Corporation (NASDAQ:TFSL).

What have hedge funds been doing with TFS Financial Corporation (NASDAQ:TFSL)?

At the end of the second quarter, a total of 12 of the hedge funds we track held long positions in this stock, a change of -25% from one quarter earlier. With hedgies’ capital changing hands, there exists a few notable hedge fund managers who were boosting their holdings meaningfully.

According to our 13F database, Michael A. Price and Amos Meron’s Empyrean Capital Partners had the largest position in TFS Financial Corporation (NASDAQ:TFSL), worth close to $67.2 million, comprising 1.6% of its total 13F portfolio. Sitting at the No. 2 spot is Jim Simons of Renaissance Technologies, with a $49.7 million position; the fund has 0.1% of its 13F portfolio invested in the stock. Other hedge funds that are bullish include Debra Fine’s Fine Capital Partners, Yale M. Fergang and Robert W. Medway’s Royal Capital and Howard Guberman’s Gruss Asset Management.

Due to the fact TFS Financial Corporation (NASDAQ:TFSL) has witnessed dropping sentiment from the smart money’s best and brightest, we can see that there is a sect of fund managers that elected to cut their positions entirely in Q1. Interestingly, Dmitry Balyasny’s Balyasny Asset Management said goodbye to the biggest investment of all the hedgies we monitor, worth about $3.8 million in call options.. Louis Bacon’s fund, Moore Global Investments, also dropped its call options., about $1.1 million worth. These transactions are intriguing to say the least, as total hedge fund interest fell by 4 funds in Q1.

Insider trading activity in TFS Financial Corporation (NASDAQ:TFSL)

Bullish insider trading is most useful when the primary stock in question has experienced transactions within the past 180 days. Over the last six-month time period, TFS Financial Corporation (NASDAQ:TFSL) has seen zero unique insiders purchasing, and zero insider sales (see the details of insider trades here).

We’ll go over the relationship between both of these indicators in other stocks similar to TFS Financial Corporation (NASDAQ:TFSL). These stocks are PrivateBancorp Inc (NASDAQ:PVTB), Comerica Incorporated (NYSE:CMA), Huntington Bancshares Incorporated (NASDAQ:HBAN), Firstmerit Corp (NASDAQ:FMER), and Associated Banc Corp (NASDAQ:ASBC). This group of stocks belong to the regional – midwest banks industry and their market caps match TFSL’s market cap.