Do Hedge Funds Love Henry Schein, Inc. (HSIC)?

Insider Monkey finished processing more than 700 13F filings made by hedge funds and prominent investors. These filings show these funds’ portfolio positions as of September 30. In this article we are going to take a look at smart money sentiment towards Henry Schein, Inc. (NASDAQ:HSIC).

Henry Schein, Inc. (NASDAQ:HSIC) shares haven’t seen a lot of action during the fourth quarter. Overall, hedge fund sentiment was unchanged. The stock was in 23 hedge funds’ portfolios at the end of September. The level and the change in hedge fund popularity aren’t the only variables you need to analyze to decipher hedge funds’ perspectives. A stock may witness a boost in popularity but it may still be less popular than similarly priced stocks. That’s why at the end of this article we will examine companies such as Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd. (NYSE:RCL), Agilent Technologies Inc. (NYSE:A), and Interactive Brokers Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:IBKR) to gather more data points.

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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Keeping this in mind, let’s take a glance at the fresh action surrounding Henry Schein, Inc. (NASDAQ:HSIC).

What does the smart money think about Henry Schein, Inc. (NASDAQ:HSIC)?

At the end of the third quarter, a total of 23 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were bullish on this stock, unchanged from one quarter earlier. With hedgies’ sentiment swirling, there exists a few key hedge fund managers who were upping their stakes meaningfully (or already accumulated large positions).

Of the funds tracked by Insider Monkey, Generation Investment Management, managed by David Blood and Al Gore, holds the number one position in Henry Schein, Inc. (NASDAQ:HSIC). According to its latest 13F filing, the fund has a $106.3 million position in the stock, comprising 1.2% of its 13F portfolio. Coming in second is Fisher Asset Management, led by Ken Fisher, holding a $78.1 million position; the fund has 0.1% of its 13F portfolio invested in the stock. Remaining peers that hold long positions consist of Phill Gross and Robert Atchinson’s Adage Capital Management, Mario Gabelli’s GAMCO Investors and Eric Bannasch’s Cadian Capital.