World-class money managers like Ken Griffin and Barry Rosenstein only invest their wealthy clients’ money after undertaking a rigorous examination of any potential stock. They are particularly successful in this regard when it comes to small-cap stocks, which their peerless research gives them a big information advantage on when it comes to judging their worth. It’s not surprising then that they generate their biggest returns from these stocks and invest more of their money in these stocks on average than other investors. It’s also not surprising then that we pay close attention to these picks ourselves and have built a market-beating investment strategy around them.
One stock that registered an increase in popularity among smart money investors is Federal Realty Investment Trust (NYSE:FRT), in which the number of bullish hedge fund bets went up by five during the third quarter. In this way, 17 funds tracked by Insider Monkey held shares of the company at the end of September. At the end of this article we will also compare FRT to other stocks including Xilinx, Inc. (NASDAQ:XLNX), D.R. Horton, Inc. (NYSE:DHI), and Extra Space Storage, Inc. (NYSE:EXR) to get a better sense of its popularity.
Follow Federal Realty Investment Trust (NYSE:FRT)
Follow Federal Realty Investment Trust (NYSE:FRT)
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 look at the key action encompassing Federal Realty Investment Trust (NYSE:FRT).
How are hedge funds trading Federal Realty Investment Trust (NYSE:FRT)?
At Q3’s end, a total of 17 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey held long positions in this stock, a change of 42% from one quarter earlier. Below, you can check out the change in hedge fund sentiment towards FRT over the last five quarters. So, let’s see which hedge funds were among the top holders of the stock and which hedge funds were making big moves.
According to publicly available hedge fund and institutional investor holdings data compiled by Insider Monkey, Jeffrey Furber’s AEW Capital Management has the number one position in Federal Realty Investment Trust (NYSE:FRT), worth close to $162.3 million, accounting for 3.4% of its total 13F portfolio. The second most bullish fund manager is Israel Englander’s Millennium Management, which holds a $21.1 million position; the fund has less than 0.1% of its 13F portfolio invested in the stock. Remaining hedge funds and institutional investors with similar optimism contain Phill Gross and Robert Atchinson’s Adage Capital Management and Eduardo Abush’s Waterfront Capital Partners. 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.
As one would reasonably expect, key hedge funds have jumped into Federal Realty Investment Trust (NYSE:FRT) headfirst. Millennium Management assembled the most outsized position in Federal Realty Investment Trust (NYSE:FRT). John Overdeck and David Siegel’s Two Sigma Advisors also made a $12.5 million investment in the stock during the quarter. The other funds with brand new FRT positions are Dmitry Balyasny’s Balyasny Asset Management, David Harding’s Winton Capital Management, and Michael Platt and William Reeves’s BlueCrest Capital Mgmt.
Let’s go over hedge fund activity in other stocks similar to Federal Realty Investment Trust (NYSE:FRT). These stocks are Xilinx, Inc. (NASDAQ:XLNX), D.R. Horton, Inc. (NYSE:DHI), Extra Space Storage, Inc. (NYSE:EXR), and CGI Group Inc. (USA) (NYSE:GIB). This group of stocks’ market values match FRT’s market value.
| Ticker | No of HFs with positions | Total Value of HF Positions (x1000) | Change in HF Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| XLNX | 41 | 1176907 | 5 |
| DHI | 40 | 1102977 | 9 |
| EXR | 21 | 96553 | 1 |
| GIB | 16 | 121641 | 1 |
As you can see these stocks had an average of 30 funds with bullish positions and the average amount invested in these stocks was $625 million. That figure was $262 million in FRT’s case. Xilinx, Inc. (NASDAQ:XLNX) is the most popular stock in this table. On the other hand CGI Group Inc. (USA) (NYSE:GIB) is the least popular one with only 16 bullish hedge fund positions. Federal Realty Investment Trust (NYSE:FRT) is not the least popular stock in this group but hedge fund interest is still below average. This is a slightly negative signal and we’d rather spend our time researching stocks that hedge funds are piling on. In this regard Xilinx, Inc. (NASDAQ:XLNX) might be a better candidate to consider taking a long position in.
