Hedge Funds Are Crazy About First Majestic Silver Corp (AG)

The 700+ hedge funds and money managers tracked by Insider Monkey have already compiled and submitted their 13F filings for the third quarter, which unveil their equity positions as of September 30. We went through these filings, fixed typos and other more significant errors and identified the changes in hedge fund positions. Our extensive review of these public filings is finally over, so this article is set to reveal the smart money sentiment towards First Majestic Silver Corp (NYSE:AG).

Is First Majestic Silver Corp (NYSE:AG) an outstanding investment now? Investors who are in the know are buying. The number of bullish hedge fund bets advanced by 9 lately. At the end of this article we will also compare AG to other stocks including Selective Insurance Group (NASDAQ:SIGI), Care Capital Properties Inc (NYSE:CCP), and Nord Anglia Education Inc (NYSE:NORD) to get a better sense of its popularity.

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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What have hedge funds been doing with First Majestic Silver Corp (NYSE:AG)?

Heading into the fourth quarter of 2016, a total of 19 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey held long positions in this stock, a 90% leap from one quarter earlier. Hedge fund ownership of the stock is now up by over 200% in the last three quarters. With the smart money’s sentiment swirling, there exists a few key hedge fund managers who were boosting their holdings significantly (or already accumulated large positions).

According to Insider Monkey’s hedge fund database, Arrowstreet Capital, managed by Peter Rathjens, Bruce Clarke and John Campbell, holds the biggest position in First Majestic Silver Corp (NYSE:AG). Arrowstreet Capital has a $43.2 million position in the stock. The second largest stake is held by Sprott Asset Management, led by Eric Sprott, holding a $17.3 million position. Remaining peers with similar optimism consist of Israel Englander’s Millennium Management and Alok Agrawal’s Bloom Tree Partners.