Do Hedge Funds Love Sanmina Corp (SANM)?

We have been waiting for this for a year and finally the third quarter ended up showing a nice bump in the performance of small-cap stocks. Both the S&P 500 and Russell 2000 were up since the end of the second quarter, but small-cap stocks outperformed the large-cap stocks by double digits. This is important for hedge funds, which are big supporters of small-cap stocks, because their investors started pulling some of their capital out due to poor recent performance. It is very likely that equity hedge funds will deliver better risk adjusted returns in the second half of this year. In this article we are going to look at how this recent market trend affected the sentiment of hedge funds towards Sanmina Corp (NASDAQ:SANM) , and what that likely means for the prospects of the company and its stock.

Sanmina Corp (NASDAQ:SANM) shareholders have witnessed a decrease in support from the world’s most successful money managers in recent months. SANM was in 20 hedge funds’ portfolios at the end of September. There were 21 hedge funds in our database with SANM positions at the end of the previous quarter. 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 On Assignment, Inc. (NYSE:ASGN), Novavax, Inc. (NASDAQ:NVAX), and Mine Safety Appliances (NYSE:MSA) 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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What does the smart money think about Sanmina Corp (NASDAQ:SANM)?

At the end of the third quarter, a total of 20 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were bullish on this stock, a decline of 5% from the second quarter of 2016. Below, you can check out the change in hedge fund sentiment towards SANM over the last 5 quarters. So, let’s see which hedge funds were among the top holders of the stock and which hedge funds were making big moves.

Of the funds tracked by Insider Monkey, Arrowstreet Capital, led by Peter Rathjens, Bruce Clarke and John Campbell, holds the most valuable position in Sanmina Corp (NASDAQ:SANM). Arrowstreet Capital has a $25.2 million position in the stock. The second largest stake is held by Cliff Asness of AQR Capital Management, with a $20.5 million position. Other professional money managers that are bullish encompass Chuck Royce’s Royce & Associates, Robert B. Gillam’s McKinley Capital Management and D. E. Shaw’s D E Shaw. 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.