Hedge Funds Are Buying Parker Drilling Company (PKD)

There are several ways to beat the market, and investing in small cap stocks has historically been one of them. We like to improve the odds of beating the market further by examining what famous hedge fund operators such as Carl Icahn and George Soros think. Those hedge fund operators make billions of dollars each year by hiring the best and the brightest to do research on stocks, including small cap stocks that big brokerage houses simply don’t cover. Because of Carl Icahn and other successful funds’ exemplary historical records, we pay attention to their small cap picks. In this article, we use hedge fund filing data to analyze Parker Drilling Company (NYSE:PKD) .

Is Parker Drilling Company (NYSE:PKD) going to take off soon? The best stock pickers are categorically turning bullish. The number of bullish hedge fund bets that are revealed through the 13F filings experienced an increase of 2 in recent months. PKD was in 11 hedge funds’ portfolios at the end of the third quarter of 2016. There were 9 hedge funds in our database with PKD positions at the end of the previous quarter. The level and the change in hedge fund popularity aren’t the only variables you need to analyze to decipher hedge funds’ perspectives. A stock may witness a boost in popularity but it may still be less popular than similarly priced stocks. That’s why at the end of this article we will examine companies such as PICO Holdings Inc (NASDAQ:PICO), RigNet Inc (NASDAQ:RNET), and JP Energy Partners LP (NYSE:JPEP) to gather more data points.

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.

QiuJu Song/Shuterrstock.com

Keeping this in mind, let’s go over the key action surrounding Parker Drilling Company (NYSE:PKD).

How are hedge funds trading Parker Drilling Company (NYSE:PKD)?

At the end of the third quarter, a total of 11 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were bullish on this stock, a change of 22% from the second quarter of 2016. On the other hand, there were a total of 11 hedge funds with a bullish position in PKD at the beginning of this year. With hedgies’ positions undergoing their usual ebb and flow, there exists a select group of notable hedge fund managers who were upping their stakes substantially (or already accumulated large positions).

When looking at the institutional investors followed by Insider Monkey, Don Morgan’s Brigade Capital has the largest position in Parker Drilling Company (NYSE:PKD), worth close to $6.3 million, corresponding to 0.3% of its total 13F portfolio. On Brigade Capital’s heels is Renaissance Technologies, led by Jim Simons, holding a $2.1 million position; less than 0.1% of its 13F portfolio is allocated to the stock. Other members of the smart money that are bullish comprise Dmitry Balyasny’s Balyasny Asset Management, Chuck Royce’s Royce & Associates and Millennium Management, one of the biggest hedge funds in the world. We should note that Brigade Capital is 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.