At Insider Monkey, we pore over the filings of more than 700 top investment firms every quarter, a process we have now completed for the latest reporting period. The data we’ve gathered as a result gives us access to a wealth of collective knowledge based on these firms’ portfolio holdings as of September 30. In this article, we will use that wealth of knowledge to determine whether or not Line Corp (ADR) (NYSE:LN) makes for a good investment right now.
Is Line Corp (ADR) (NYSE:LN) a bargain? The stock went public in mid-July and by the end of the third quarter, it managed to capture the attention of 14 funds tracked by Insider Monkey. 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 The Western Union Company (NYSE:WU), IDEXX Laboratories, Inc. (NASDAQ:IDXX), and Kansas City Southern (NYSE:KSU) to gather more data points.
We follow over 700 hedge funds and other institutional investors and by analyzing their quarterly 13F filings, we identify stocks that they are collectively bullish on and develop investment strategies based on this data. One strategy that outperformed the market over the last year involves selecting the 100 best-performing funds and identifying the 30 mid-cap stocks that they are collectively most bullish on. Over the past year, this strategy generated returns of 18%, topping the 8% gain registered by S&P 500 ETFs. We launched this strategy 2.5 years ago and it returned more than 39% since then, vs. 22% gain registered by the S&P 500 ETFs.
hin255/Shutterstock.com
With all of this in mind, let’s go over the fresh action surrounding Line Corp (ADR) (NYSE:LN).
Hedge fund activity in Line Corp (ADR) (NYSE:LN)
As stated earlier, heading into the fourth quarter of 2016, a total of 14 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were bullish on this stock. So, let’s check out which hedge funds were among the top holders of the stock at the end of September.
When looking at the institutional investors followed by Insider Monkey, Brett Barakett’s Tremblant Capital has the most valuable position in Line Corp (ADR) (NYSE:LN), worth close to $65.2 million, accounting for 3.6% of its total 13F portfolio. The second most bullish fund manager is Hillhouse Capital Management, led by Lei Zhang, holding a $16.3 million position; the fund has 0.3% of its 13F portfolio invested in the stock. Paul Marshall and Ian Wace’s Marshall Wace LLP, Ben Levine, Andrew Manuel and Stefan Renold’s LMR Partners, and Ken Griffin’s Citadel Investment Group also ranked among the largest shareholders of Line Corp at the end of September. We should note that none of these hedge funds are among our list of the 100 best performing hedge funds which is based on the performance of their 13F long positions in non-microcap stocks.
On the next page, we’ll compare the sentiment surrounding Line Corp with the same metric registered by other stocks with similar market values.
