Do Hedge Funds Love Trustmark Corp (TRMK)?

The Insider Monkey team has completed processing the quarterly 13F filings for the September quarter submitted by the hedge funds and other money managers included in our extensive database. Most hedge funds have been producing disappointing net returns in recent years, however that was partly due to the poor performance of small-cap stocks in general. Well, small-cap stocks finally turned the corner and have been beating the large-cap stocks by more than 10 percentage points over the last 5 months.This means the relevancy of hedge funds’ public filings became inarguable, as they may reveal numerous high-potential stocks. The following article will discuss the smart money sentiment towards Trustmark Corp (NASDAQ:TRMK).

Is Trustmark Corp (NASDAQ:TRMK) the right pick for your portfolio? Money managers are actually in a bearish mood. The number of bullish hedge fund investments fell by 1 lately. There were 7 hedge funds in our database with TRMK positions at the end of the 2016 third quarter. At the end of this article we will also compare TRMK to other stocks including Platform Specialty Products Corp (NYSE:PAH), Diplomat Pharmacy Inc (NYSE:DPLO), and Synchronoss Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ:SNCR) 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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Now, let’s review the latest action regarding Trustmark Corp (NASDAQ:TRMK).

What does the smart money think about Trustmark Corp (NASDAQ:TRMK)?

At the end of the third quarter, a total of 7 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey held long positions in this stock, down 13% from one quarter earlier. On the other hand, there were a total of 9 hedge funds with a bullish position in TRMK at the beginning of this year. With hedgies’ sentiment swirling, there exists an “upper tier” of key hedge fund managers who were upping their holdings substantially (or already accumulated large positions).

Of the funds tracked by Insider Monkey, Renaissance Technologies, one of the biggest hedge funds in the world, holds the number one position in Trustmark Corp (NASDAQ:TRMK). According to regulatory filings, the fund has a $14.3 million position in the stock, comprising less than 0.1% of its 13F portfolio. Sitting at the No. 2 spot is AQR Capital Management, led by Cliff Asness, which holds a $11.2 million position; the fund has less than 0.1% of its 13F portfolio invested in the stock. Other hedge funds and institutional investors that hold long positions include Sharif Siddiqui’s Alpenglow Capital, Solomon Kumin’s Folger Hill Asset Management and Dmitry Balyasny’s Balyasny Asset Management. 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.