Hedge Funds Are Dumping Portland General Electric Company (POR)

Insider Monkey has processed numerous 13F filings of hedge funds and successful value investors to create an extensive database of hedge fund holdings. The 13F filings show the hedge funds’ and successful investors’ positions as of the end of the first quarter. You can find articles about an individual hedge fund’s trades on numerous financial news websites. However, in this article we will take a look at their collective moves over the last 4.5 years and analyze what the smart money thinks of Portland General Electric Company (NYSE:POR) based on that data.

Is Portland General Electric Company (NYSE:POR) a buy here? The best stock pickers are turning less bullish. The number of bullish hedge fund bets went down by 4 in recent months. Our calculations also showed that POR isn’t among the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds (click for Q1 rankings and see the video for a quick look at the top 5 stocks).

Video: Watch our video about the top 5 most popular hedge fund stocks.

In the financial world there are a large number of tools investors have at their disposal to grade stocks. A pair of the most under-the-radar tools are hedge fund and insider trading indicators. We have shown that, historically, those who follow the top picks of the best fund managers can outperform the broader indices by a solid amount. Insider Monkey’s monthly stock picks returned 101% since March 2017 and outperformed the S&P 500 ETFs by more than 58 percentage points. Our short strategy outperformed the S&P 500 short ETFs by 20 percentage points annually (see the details here). That’s why we believe hedge fund sentiment is a useful indicator that investors should pay attention to.

Paul Tudor Jones of Tudor Investment Corp

At Insider Monkey we leave no stone unturned when looking for the next great investment idea. For example, 2020’s unprecedented market conditions provide us with the highest number of trading opportunities in a decade. So we are checking out trades like this one. We interview hedge fund managers and ask them about their best ideas. If you want to find out the best healthcare stock to buy right now, you can watch our latest hedge fund manager interview here. We read hedge fund investor letters and listen to stock pitches at hedge fund conferences. Our best call in 2020 was shorting the market when the S&P 500 was trading at 3150 after realizing the coronavirus pandemic’s significance before most investors. Keeping this in mind let’s take a look at the new hedge fund action surrounding Portland General Electric Company (NYSE:POR).

Hedge fund activity in Portland General Electric Company (NYSE:POR)

Heading into the second quarter of 2020, a total of 23 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey held long positions in this stock, a change of -15% from the previous quarter. By comparison, 19 hedge funds held shares or bullish call options in POR a year ago. 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, Renaissance Technologies, holds the most valuable position in Portland General Electric Company (NYSE:POR). Renaissance Technologies has a $150.1 million position in the stock, comprising 0.1% of its 13F portfolio. On Renaissance Technologies’s heels is Israel Englander of Millennium Management, with a $39.3 million position; the fund has 0.1% of its 13F portfolio invested in the stock. Other peers with similar optimism encompass John Overdeck and David Siegel’s Two Sigma Advisors, Cliff Asness’s AQR Capital Management and Noam Gottesman’s GLG Partners. In terms of the portfolio weights assigned to each position Cinctive Capital Management allocated the biggest weight to Portland General Electric Company (NYSE:POR), around 0.83% of its 13F portfolio. Newtyn Management is also relatively very bullish on the stock, designating 0.83 percent of its 13F equity portfolio to POR.

Judging by the fact that Portland General Electric Company (NYSE:POR) has experienced falling interest from the entirety of the hedge funds we track, we can see that there exists a select few hedgies that decided to sell off their full holdings by the end of the first quarter. Intriguingly, Sara Nainzadeh’s Centenus Global Management sold off the largest investment of all the hedgies monitored by Insider Monkey, valued at about $9.8 million in stock, and Brian Olson, Baehyun Sung, and Jamie Waters’s Blackstart Capital was right behind this move, as the fund sold off about $5.2 million worth. These moves are important to note, as aggregate hedge fund interest was cut by 4 funds by the end of the first quarter.

Let’s now take a look at hedge fund activity in other stocks similar to Portland General Electric Company (NYSE:POR). These stocks are FLIR Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:FLIR), NewMarket Corporation (NYSE:NEU), TFS Financial Corporation (NASDAQ:TFSL), and Globus Medical Inc (NYSE:GMED). All of these stocks’ market caps are similar to POR’s market cap.

View table here if you experience formatting issues.

As you can see these stocks had an average of 20.5 hedge funds with bullish positions and the average amount invested in these stocks was $159 million. That figure was $247 million in POR’s case. FLIR Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:FLIR) is the most popular stock in this table. On the other hand TFS Financial Corporation (NASDAQ:TFSL) is the least popular one with only 9 bullish hedge fund positions. Portland General Electric Company (NYSE:POR) is not the most popular stock in this group but hedge fund interest is still above average. This is a slightly positive signal but we’d rather spend our time researching stocks that hedge funds are piling on. Our calculations showed that top 10 most popular stocks among hedge funds returned 41.4% in 2019 and outperformed the S&P 500 ETF (SPY) by 10.1 percentage points. These stocks gained 13.9% in 2020 through June 10th but beat the market by 14.2 percentage points. Unfortunately POR wasn’t nearly as popular as these 10 stocks and hedge funds that were betting on POR were disappointed as the stock returned -2.6% during the same time period and underperformed the market. If you are interested in investing in large cap stocks with huge upside potential, you should check out the top 10 most popular stocks among hedge funds as many of these stocks already outperformed the market so far this year.

Disclosure: None. This article was originally published at Insider Monkey.