FEI Company (NASDAQ:FEIC) is in the spotlight today after the company announced that it is being acquired by Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. (NYSE:TMO) for $107.50 per share, or $4.2 billion in a deal that has been unanimously approved by both companies’ board of directors. In a press release, Don Kania, CEO of FEI, said that the deal with Thermo Fisher brings a lot of benefits to the company’s shareholders, customers and employees. Mr. Kania said that Thermo Fisher is a large and growing company, and working with it will expand FEI’s business opportunities. The deal comes two months after Thermo Fisher, the Massachusetts-based biotechnology development company bought gene-sequencing products maker Affymetrix for $1.3 billion. Shares of TMO are up marginally in morning trading today.
The government requires hedge funds and wealthy investors with over a certain portfolio size to file a report that shows their positions at the end of every quarter. Even though it isn’t the intention, these filings level the playing field for ordinary investors. The latest round of 13F filings discloses the funds’ positions as of March 31. We at Insider Monkey have made an extensive database of more than 760 of those elite funds and prominent investors’ filings. In this article, we use that data to analyze how these elite funds and prominent investors traded FEI Company (NASDAQ:FEIC).
FEI Company (NASDAQ:FEIC) shareholders have witnessed a decrease in enthusiasm from smart money lately. FEIC was in 9 hedge funds’ portfolios at the end of the first quarter of 2016. There were 12 hedge funds in our database with FEIC positions at the end of the previous quarter. We track prominent investors and hedge funds because our research has shown that historically their stock picks delivered superior risk-adjusted returns. This is especially true in the small-cap space. The 15 most popular small-cap stocks among a select group of investors delivered a monthly alpha of 80 basis points between 1999 and 2012 (see the details here).
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Of the funds tracked by Insider Monkey, Ken Fisher’s Fisher Asset Management has the biggest position in FEI Company (NASDAQ:FEIC), worth close to $79.2 million, accounting for 0.2% of its total 13F portfolio. Coming in second is Anders Hallberg and Carl Bennet of HealthInvest Partners AB, with a $21.3 million position; 10% of its 13F portfolio is allocated to the stock. Remaining peers with similar optimism consist of Krishen Sud’s Sivik Global Healthcare, Wojciech Uzdelewicz’s Espalier Global Management, and Matthew Hulsizer’s PEAK6 Capital Management.
Judging by the fact that FEI Company (NASDAQ:FEIC) has faced falling interest from hedge fund managers, logic holds that there was a specific group of money managers that decided to sell off their entire stakes last quarter. At the top of the heap, Joel Greenblatt’s Gotham Asset Management dumped the largest stake of all the hedgies watched by Insider Monkey, valued at close to $7.8 million in stock. Malcolm Fairbairn’s fund, Ascend Capital, also dropped its stock, about $5.2 million worth. These bearish behaviors are important to note, as aggregate hedge fund interest dropped by 3 funds last quarter.
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