Hedge funds and other investment firms run by legendary investors like Israel Englander and Ray Dalio are entrusted to manage billions of dollars of accredited investors’ money because they are without peer in the resources they use to identify the best investments for their chosen investment horizon. Moreover, they are more willing to invest a greater amount of their resources in small-cap stocks than big brokerage houses, and this is often where they generate their outperformance, which is why we pay particular attention to their best ideas in this space.
Is Nanometrics Incorporated (NASDAQ:NANO) undervalued? Investors who are in the know are reducing their bets on the stock. The number of bullish hedge fund bets suffered a reduction of 1 lately. NANO was in 15 hedge funds’ portfolios at the end of September. There were 16 hedge funds in our database with NANO holdings 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 Global Blood Therapeutics Inc (NASDAQ:GBT), SP Plus Corp (NASDAQ:SP), and Motorcar Parts of America, Inc. (NASDAQ:MPAA) to gather more data points.
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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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Hedge fund activity in Nanometrics Incorporated (NASDAQ:NANO)
Heading into the fourth quarter of 2016, a total of 15 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey held long positions in this stock, a decrease of 6% from the previous quarter. On the other hand, there were a total of 8 hedge funds with a bullish position in NANO at the beginning of this year. So, let’s examine which hedge funds were among the top holders of the stock and which hedge funds were making big moves.
When looking at the institutional investors followed by Insider Monkey, Royce & Associates, led by Chuck Royce, holds the most valuable position in Nanometrics Incorporated (NASDAQ:NANO). Royce & Associates has a $45.3 million position in the stock. The second most bullish fund manager is Jim Simons of Renaissance Technologies, with a $11.2 million position. Other peers with similar optimism encompass Peter Rathjens, Bruce Clarke and John Campbell’s Arrowstreet Capital, J. Daniel Plants’s Voce Capital and Cliff Asness’ AQR Capital Management. We should note that none of these hedge funds are 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.
