Do Hedge Funds Love Hasbro, Inc. (HAS)?

A whopping number of 13F filings filed with U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has been processed by Insider Monkey so that individual investors can look at the overall hedge fund sentiment towards the stocks included in their watchlists. These freshly-submitted public filings disclose money managers’ equity positions as of the end of the three-month period that ended March 31st, so let’s proceed with the discussion of the hedge fund sentiment on Hasbro, Inc. (NASDAQ:HAS).

Hasbro, Inc. (NASDAQ:HAS) investors should be aware of a decrease in activity from the world’s largest hedge funds lately. Hasbro, Inc. (NASDAQ:HAS) was in 31 hedge funds’ portfolios at the end of the first quarter of 2021. The all time high for this statistic is 36. There were 36 hedge funds in our database with HAS holdings at the end of December. Our calculations also showed that HAS isn’t among the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds (click for Q1 rankings).

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Peter Algert of Algert Global

At Insider Monkey, we scour multiple sources to uncover the next great investment idea. For example, lithium mining is one of the fastest growing industries right now, so we are checking out stock pitches like this emerging lithium stock. We go through lists like the 10 best EV stocks to pick the next Tesla that will deliver a 10x return. Even though we recommend positions in only a tiny fraction of the companies we analyze, we check out as many stocks as we can. We read hedge fund investor letters and listen to stock pitches at hedge fund conferences. You can subscribe to our free daily newsletter on our homepage. Keeping this in mind we’re going to go over the key hedge fund action surrounding Hasbro, Inc. (NASDAQ:HAS).

Do Hedge Funds Think HAS Is A Good Stock To Buy Now?

At the end of March, a total of 31 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey held long positions in this stock, a change of -14% from the previous quarter. The graph below displays the number of hedge funds with bullish position in HAS over the last 23 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.

When looking at the institutional investors followed by Insider Monkey, Alexander Mitchell’s Scopus Asset Management has the largest position in Hasbro, Inc. (NASDAQ:HAS), worth close to $57.7 million, accounting for 0.7% of its total 13F portfolio. The second most bullish fund manager is Balyasny Asset Management, led by Dmitry Balyasny, holding a $31.7 million position; the fund has 0.2% of its 13F portfolio invested in the stock. Some other professional money managers with similar optimism consist of Renaissance Technologies, Anand Parekh’s Alyeska Investment Group and Cliff Asness’s AQR Capital Management. In terms of the portfolio weights assigned to each position Deep Field Asset Management allocated the biggest weight to Hasbro, Inc. (NASDAQ:HAS), around 3.3% of its 13F portfolio. Sirios Capital Management is also relatively very bullish on the stock, designating 1.01 percent of its 13F equity portfolio to HAS.

Due to the fact that Hasbro, Inc. (NASDAQ:HAS) has witnessed falling interest from the smart money, we can see that there lies a certain “tier” of hedgies that decided to sell off their positions entirely last quarter. At the top of the heap, Jack Woodruff’s Candlestick Capital Management dumped the largest investment of all the hedgies tracked by Insider Monkey, worth about $42.9 million in stock. Gregg Moskowitz’s fund, Interval Partners, also sold off its stock, about $37.6 million worth. These moves are intriguing to say the least, as total hedge fund interest fell by 5 funds last quarter.

Let’s check out hedge fund activity in other stocks – not necessarily in the same industry as Hasbro, Inc. (NASDAQ:HAS) but similarly valued. These stocks are Godaddy Inc (NYSE:GDDY), Korea Electric Power Corporation (NYSE:KEP), iQIYI, Inc. (NASDAQ:IQ), Crown Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:CCK), Oak Street Health, Inc. (NYSE:OSH), The Carlyle Group Inc (NASDAQ:CG), and UDR, Inc. (NYSE:UDR). All of these stocks’ market caps resemble HAS’s market cap.

View table here if you experience formatting issues.

As you can see these stocks had an average of 32.9 hedge funds with bullish positions and the average amount invested in these stocks was $1028 million. That figure was $277 million in HAS’s case. Crown Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:CCK) is the most popular stock in this table. On the other hand Korea Electric Power Corporation (NYSE:KEP) is the least popular one with only 4 bullish hedge fund positions. Hasbro, Inc. (NASDAQ:HAS) is not the least popular stock in this group but hedge fund interest is still below average. Our overall hedge fund sentiment score for HAS is 49.9. Stocks with higher number of hedge fund positions relative to other stocks as well as relative to their historical range receive a higher sentiment score. 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 5 most popular stocks among hedge funds returned 95.8% in 2019 and 2020, and outperformed the S&P 500 ETF (SPY) by 40 percentage points. These stocks gained 22.8% in 2021 through July 2nd and surpassed the market again by 6 percentage points. Unfortunately HAS wasn’t nearly as popular as these 5 stocks (hedge fund sentiment was quite bearish); HAS investors were disappointed as the stock returned 1.2% since the end of March (through 7/2) and underperformed the market. If you are interested in investing in large cap stocks with huge upside potential, you should check out the top 5 most popular stocks among hedge funds as most of these stocks already outperformed the market in 2021.

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