EnPro Industries, Inc. (NYSE:NPO) was in 17 hedge funds’ portfolio at the end of March. NPO investors should pay attention to an increase in activity from the world’s largest hedge funds in recent months. There were 11 hedge funds in our database with NPO holdings at the end of the previous quarter.
If you’d ask most investors, hedge funds are assumed to be unimportant, old investment tools of the past. While there are greater than 8000 funds with their doors open at present, we at Insider Monkey look at the bigwigs of this club, about 450 funds. It is widely believed that this group controls most of the smart money’s total capital, and by tracking their best stock picks, we have figured out a few investment strategies that have historically beaten the market. Our small-cap hedge fund strategy outpaced the S&P 500 index by 18 percentage points per annum 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 outpaced the S&P 500 index by 23.3 percentage points in 8 months (see the details here).
Equally as integral, bullish insider trading sentiment is another way to break down the investments you’re interested in. Obviously, there are lots of stimuli for a corporate insider to downsize shares of his or her company, but just one, very clear reason why they would behave bullishly. Several empirical studies have demonstrated the useful potential of this strategy if “monkeys” know what to do (learn more here).
With all of this in mind, let’s take a gander at the key action regarding EnPro Industries, Inc. (NYSE:NPO).
How are hedge funds trading EnPro Industries, Inc. (NYSE:NPO)?
At the end of the first quarter, a total of 17 of the hedge funds we track were long in this stock, a change of 55% from the previous quarter. With the smart money’s positions undergoing their usual ebb and flow, there exists a select group of key hedge fund managers who were upping their stakes meaningfully.
With a general bullishness amongst the heavyweights, key money managers were leading the bulls’ herd. Greywolf Capital Management, managed by Jonathan Savitz, established the most outsized position in EnPro Industries, Inc. (NYSE:NPO). Greywolf Capital Management had 17.6 million invested in the company at the end of the quarter. Michael Platt and William Reeves’s BlueCrest Capital Mgmt. also initiated a $9.2 million position during the quarter. The other funds with new positions in the stock are Michael M. Rothenberg and David Sackler’s Moab Capital Partners, Bart Baum’s Ionic Capital Management, and Stephen Loukas, David A. Lorber, Zachary George’s FrontFour Capital Group.
How are insiders trading EnPro Industries, Inc. (NYSE:NPO)?
Bullish insider trading is particularly usable when the company we’re looking at has seen transactions within the past six months. Over the latest six-month time frame, EnPro Industries, Inc. (NYSE:NPO) has experienced 1 unique insiders purchasing, and 1 insider sales (see the details of insider trades here).
Let’s also examine hedge fund and insider activity in other stocks similar to EnPro Industries, Inc. (NYSE:NPO). These stocks are Barnes Group Inc. (NYSE:B), CIRCOR International, Inc. (NYSE:CIR), Sun Hydraulics Corporation (NASDAQ:SNHY), TriMas Corp (NASDAQ:TRS), and Mueller Water Products, Inc. (NYSE:MWA). All of these stocks are in the industrial equipment & components industry and their market caps resemble NPO’s market cap.
