Enterprise Products Partners L.P. (EPD): Hedge Funds Are Bullish and Insiders Are Undecided, What Should You Do?

At the moment, there are plenty of indicators market participants can use to analyze publicly traded companies. A couple of the most under-the-radar are hedge fund and insider trading sentiment. At Insider Monkey, our research analyses have shown that, historically, those who follow the best picks of the elite investment managers can trounce their index-focused peers by a very impressive amount (see just how much).

Equally as key, optimistic insider trading sentiment is a second way to look at the investments you’re interested in. Just as you’d expect, there are a variety of incentives for an insider to sell shares of his or her company, but only one, very clear reason why they would behave bullishly. Plenty of academic studies have demonstrated the valuable potential of this tactic if “monkeys” know what to do (learn more here).

Keeping this in mind, let’s study the newest info about Enterprise Products Partners L.P. (NYSE:EPD).

Hedge fund activity in Enterprise Products Partners L.P. (NYSE:EPD)

At the end of the second quarter, a total of 17 of the hedge funds we track held long positions in this stock, a change of 13% from one quarter earlier. With the smart money’s capital changing hands, there exists an “upper tier” of key hedge fund managers who were boosting their holdings considerably.

When using filings from the hedgies we track, John Osterweis’s Osterweis Capital Management had the largest position in Enterprise Products Partners L.P. (NYSE:EPD), worth close to $70.1 million, comprising 2.6% of its total 13F portfolio. Sitting at the No. 2 spot is Renaissance Technologies, managed by Jim Simons, which held a $34.7 million position; the fund has 0.1% of its 13F portfolio invested in the stock. Remaining hedge funds with similar optimism include Matthew Hulsizer’s PEAK6 Capital Management, Richard Driehaus’s Driehaus Capital and Dmitry Balyasny’s Balyasny Asset Management.

As one would understandably expect, certain money managers were leading the bulls’ herd. Osterweis Capital Management, managed by John Osterweis, assembled the largest position in Enterprise Products Partners L.P. (NYSE:EPD). Osterweis Capital Management had 70.1 million invested in the company at the end of the quarter. Jim Simons’s Renaissance Technologies also made a $34.7 million investment in the stock during the quarter. The other funds with new positions in the stock are Matthew Hulsizer’s PEAK6 Capital Management, Richard Driehaus’s Driehaus Capital, and Dmitry Balyasny’s Balyasny Asset Management.

How have insiders been trading Enterprise Products Partners L.P. (NYSE:EPD)?

Insider buying is best served when the company in question has experienced transactions within the past six months. Over the last 180-day time frame, Enterprise Products Partners L.P. (NYSE:EPD) has experienced zero unique insiders purchasing, and zero insider sales (see the details of insider trades here).

We’ll check out the relationship between both of these indicators in other stocks similar to Enterprise Products Partners L.P. (NYSE:EPD). These stocks are EOG Resources Inc (NYSE:EOG), Canadian Natural Resource Ltd (USA) (NYSE:CNQ), CNOOC Limited (ADR) (NYSE:CEO), Anadarko Petroleum Corporation (NYSE:APC), and Suncor Energy Inc. (USA) (NYSE:SU). This group of stocks are in the independent oil & gas industry and their market caps are similar to EPD’s market cap.