Hedge Funds Are Betting On CONMED Corporation (CNMD)

What’s a smart CONMED Corporation (NASDAQ:CNMD) investor to do?

If you were to ask many of your peers, hedge funds are seen as delayed, outdated financial vehicles of a period lost to current times. Although there are In excess of 8,000 hedge funds with their doors open currently, Insider Monkey focuses on the elite of this club, about 525 funds. It is assumed that this group controls the lion’s share of the hedge fund industry’s total capital, and by keeping an eye on their highest quality equity investments, we’ve come up with a number of investment strategies that have historically outstripped the broader indices. Our small-cap hedge fund strategy beat the S&P 500 index by 18 percentage points annually for a decade in our back tests, and since we’ve started sharing our picks with our subscribers at the end of August 2012, we have topped the S&P 500 index by 33 percentage points in 11 months (find the details here).

Equally as key, optimistic insider trading activity is another way to analyze the world of equities. Obviously, there are a number of motivations for an executive to downsize shares of his or her company, but just one, very clear reason why they would initiate a purchase. Various empirical studies have demonstrated the valuable potential of this tactic if investors understand what to do (learn more here).

What’s more, we’re going to discuss the latest info surrounding CONMED Corporation (NASDAQ:CNMD).

How are hedge funds trading CONMED Corporation (NASDAQ:CNMD)?

At the end of the second quarter, a total of 12 of the hedge funds we track held long positions in this stock, a change of 9% from the first quarter. With the smart money’s positions undergoing their usual ebb and flow, there exists an “upper tier” of noteworthy hedge fund managers who were boosting their stakes meaningfully.

As one would understandably expect, specific money managers were breaking ground themselves. Camber Capital Management, managed by Stephen DuBois, initiated the most valuable position in CONMED Corporation (NASDAQ:CNMD). Camber Capital Management had 31.2 million invested in the company at the end of the quarter. Cliff Asness’s AQR Capital Management also made a $13.4 million investment in the stock during the quarter. The following funds were also among the new CNMD investors: Jim Simons’s Renaissance Technologies, Mario Gabelli’s GAMCO Investors, and Ken Fisher’s Fisher Asset Management.

What have insiders been doing with CONMED Corporation (NASDAQ:CNMD)?

Bullish insider trading is at its handiest when the primary stock in question has seen transactions within the past 180 days. Over the latest six-month time period, CONMED Corporation (NASDAQ:CNMD) has experienced zero unique insiders buying, and zero insider sales (see the details of insider trades here).

We’ll also take a look at the relationship between both of these indicators in other stocks similar to CONMED Corporation (NASDAQ:CNMD). These stocks are Volcano Corporation (NASDAQ:VOLC), Masimo Corporation (NASDAQ:MASI), ArthroCare Corporation (NASDAQ:ARTC), NuVasive, Inc. (NASDAQ:NUVA), and Wright Medical Group Inc (NASDAQ:WMGI). All of these stocks are in the medical appliances & equipment industry and their market caps match CNMD’s market cap.

Using the results shown by Insider Monkey’s tactics, average investors should always track hedge fund and insider trading sentiment, and CONMED Corporation (NASDAQ:CNMD) shareholders fit into this picture quite nicely.

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