Hedge Funds Are Crazy About Google Inc (GOOG)

Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) has experienced an increase in activity from the world’s largest hedge funds in recent months.

In today’s marketplace, there are many gauges investors can use to analyze Mr. Market. Some of the most underrated are hedge fund and insider trading sentiment. At Insider Monkey, our studies have shown that, historically, those who follow the top picks of the top money managers can outperform the broader indices by a very impressive margin (see just how much).

Just as key, optimistic insider trading activity is a second way to parse down the financial markets. Obviously, there are many motivations for an executive to sell shares of his or her company, but just one, very simple reason why they would behave bullishly. Various academic studies have demonstrated the market-beating potential of this tactic if piggybackers know what to do (learn more here).

Now, we’re going to take a gander at the latest action surrounding Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG).

How have hedgies been trading Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG)?

At the end of March, a total of 148 of the hedge funds we track were long in this stock, a change of 8% from the fourth quarter. With the smart money’s capital changing hands, there exists a few noteworthy hedge fund managers who were increasing their holdings considerably.

Of the funds we track, Stephen Mandel’s Lone Pine Capital had the largest position in Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG), worth close to $1.1107 billion, accounting for 5.8% of its total 13F portfolio. Coming in second is Paul Ruddock and Steve Heinz of Lansdowne Partners, with a $635.4 million position; the fund has 8.7% of its 13F portfolio invested in the stock. Some other hedge funds that hold long positions include Boykin Curry’s Eagle Capital Management, Ken Fisher’s Fisher Asset Management and Ken Griffin’s Citadel Investment Group.

Consequently, some big names have been driving this bullishness. Senator Investment Group, managed by Doug Silverman and Alexander Klabin, created the most outsized call position in Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG). Senator Investment Group had 238.3 million invested in the company at the end of the quarter. Panayotis Takis Sparaggis’s Alkeon Capital Management also made a $234.9 million investment in the stock during the quarter. The other funds with new positions in the stock are Robert Rodriguez and Steven Romick’s First Pacific Advisors LLC, John Armitage’s Egerton Capital Limited, and Eric Bannasch’s Cadian Capital.

How are insiders trading Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG)?

Insider trading activity, especially when it’s bullish, is most useful when the primary stock in question has seen transactions within the past 180 days. Over the latest half-year time period, Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) has seen zero unique insiders buying, and 11 insider sales (see the details of insider trades here).

Let’s go over hedge fund and insider activity in other stocks similar to Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG). These stocks are Yandex NV (NASDAQ:YNDX), LinkedIn Corp (NYSE:LNKD), Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO), Baidu.com, Inc. (ADR) (NASDAQ:BIDU), and Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB). This group of stocks are in the internet information providers industry and their market caps match GOOG’s market cap.