Do Hedge Funds Love Boeing Co (BA)?

Hedge funds run by legendary names like Nelson Peltz and David Tepper make billions of dollars a year for themselves and their super-rich accredited investors (you’ve got to have a minimum of $1 million liquid to invest in a hedge fund) by spending enormous resources on analyzing and uncovering data about small-cap stocks that the big brokerage houses don’t follow. Small caps are where they can generate significant out-performance. These stocks have been on a tear since the end of June, outperforming large-cap index funds by more than 10 percentage points. That’s why we pay special attention to hedge fund activity in these stocks.

Boeing Co (NYSE:BA) investors should be aware of a decrease in support from the world’s most elite money managers recently. At the end of this article we will also compare BA to other stocks including Toronto-Dominion Bank (USA) (NYSE:TD), QUALCOMM, Inc. (NASDAQ:QCOM), and Diageo plc (ADR) (NYSE:DEO) to get a better sense of its popularity.

At Insider Monkey, we’ve developed an investment strategy that has delivered market-beating returns over the past 12 months. Our strategy identifies the 100 best-performing funds of the previous quarter from among the collection of 700+ successful funds that we track in our database, which we accomplish using our returns methodology. We then study the portfolios of those 100 funds using the latest 13F data to uncover the 30 most popular mid-cap stocks (market caps of between $1 billion and $10 billion) among them to hold until the next filing period. This strategy delivered 18% gains over the past 12 months, more than doubling the 8% returns enjoyed by the S&P 500 ETFs.

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With all of this in mind, let’s go over the recent action encompassing Boeing Co (NYSE:BA).

What does the smart money think about Boeing Co (NYSE:BA)?

At the end of the third quarter, a total of 39 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were bullish on this stock, a drop of 3% from the previous quarter. With hedge funds’ capital changing hands, there exists a few key hedge fund managers who were boosting their holdings significantly (or already accumulated large positions).

Of the funds tracked by Insider Monkey, Edgar Wachenheim’s Greenhaven Associates has the largest position in Boeing Co (NYSE:BA), worth close to $227.7 million, amounting to 4.3% of its total 13F portfolio. The second most bullish fund manager is AQR Capital Management, run by Cliff Asness, which holds a $178.9 million position; 0.3% of its 13F portfolio is allocated to the stock. Other peers with similar optimism encompass John Overdeck and David Siegel’s Two Sigma Advisors, and Phill Gross and Robert Atchinson’s Adage Capital Management.