We at Insider Monkey have gone over 866 13F filings that hedge funds and prominent investors are required to file by the SEC. The 13F filings show the funds’ and investors’ portfolio positions as of March 31st. In this article, we look at what those funds think of Amedisys Inc (NASDAQ:AMED) based on that data.
Amedisys Inc (NASDAQ:AMED) was in 26 hedge funds’ portfolios at the end of March. The all time high for this statistic is 32. AMED investors should be aware of an increase in activity from the world’s largest hedge funds in recent months. There were 20 hedge funds in our database with AMED holdings at the end of December. Our calculations also showed that AMED isn’t among the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds (click for Q1 rankings).
In the financial world there are a lot of gauges investors can use to assess publicly traded companies. Two of the most useful gauges are hedge fund and insider trading interest. Our researchers have shown that, historically, those who follow the top picks of the top fund managers can outpace the market by a significant margin (see the details here). Also, our monthly newsletter’s portfolio of long stock picks returned 206.8% since March 2017 (through May 2021) and beat the S&P 500 Index by more than 115 percentage points. You can download a sample issue of this newsletter on our website .
Louis Navellier of Navellier & Associates
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Do Hedge Funds Think AMED Is A Good Stock To Buy Now?
At the end of the first quarter, a total of 26 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were long this stock, a change of 30% from the previous quarter. By comparison, 20 hedge funds held shares or bullish call options in AMED a year ago. So, let’s find out which hedge funds were among the top holders of the stock and which hedge funds were making big moves.
According to publicly available hedge fund and institutional investor holdings data compiled by Insider Monkey, D E Shaw, managed by D. E. Shaw, holds the largest position in Amedisys Inc (NASDAQ:AMED). D E Shaw has a $84.6 million position in the stock, comprising 0.1% of its 13F portfolio. The second largest stake is held by Marshall Wace LLP, managed by Paul Marshall and Ian Wace, which holds a $66.5 million position; 0.3% of its 13F portfolio is allocated to the company. Remaining hedge funds and institutional investors that are bullish comprise Jeremy Green’s Redmile Group, John Overdeck and David Siegel’s Two Sigma Advisors and Ken Griffin’s Citadel Investment Group. In terms of the portfolio weights assigned to each position SG Capital Management allocated the biggest weight to Amedisys Inc (NASDAQ:AMED), around 1.54% of its 13F portfolio. Intrinsic Edge Capital is also relatively very bullish on the stock, setting aside 1.19 percent of its 13F equity portfolio to AMED.
As one would reasonably expect, key hedge funds have been driving this bullishness. Navellier & Associates, managed by Louis Navellier, established the largest position in Amedisys Inc (NASDAQ:AMED). Navellier & Associates had $6.4 million invested in the company at the end of the quarter. Ken Grossman and Glen Schneider’s SG Capital Management also initiated a $5.2 million position during the quarter. The other funds with brand new AMED positions are Peter Rathjens, Bruce Clarke and John Campbell’s Arrowstreet Capital, Brandon Haley’s Holocene Advisors, and Michael Rockefeller and KarláKroeker’s Woodline Partners.
Let’s check out hedge fund activity in other stocks – not necessarily in the same industry as Amedisys Inc (NASDAQ:AMED) but similarly valued. These stocks are Gentex Corporation (NASDAQ:GNTX), West Fraser Timber Co. Ltd. (NYSE:WFG), Vornado Realty Trust (NYSE:VNO), Mirati Therapeutics, Inc. (NASDAQ:MRTX), Carlisle Companies, Inc. (NYSE:CSL), Service Corporation International (NYSE:SCI), and GSX Techedu Inc. (NYSE:GSX). This group of stocks’ market valuations resemble AMED’s market valuation.
| Ticker | No of HFs with positions | Total Value of HF Positions (x1000) | Change in HF Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| GNTX | 35 | 537554 | -1 |
| WFG | 25 | 580726 | 25 |
| VNO | 25 | 216181 | 2 |
| MRTX | 57 | 2867424 | 1 |
| CSL | 18 | 186375 | 1 |
| SCI | 23 | 709728 | -5 |
| GSX | 30 | 277849 | 13 |
| Average | 30.4 | 767977 | 5.1 |
View table here if you experience formatting issues.
As you can see these stocks had an average of 30.4 hedge funds with bullish positions and the average amount invested in these stocks was $768 million. That figure was $324 million in AMED’s case. Mirati Therapeutics, Inc. (NASDAQ:MRTX) is the most popular stock in this table. On the other hand Carlisle Companies, Inc. (NYSE:CSL) is the least popular one with only 18 bullish hedge fund positions. Amedisys Inc (NASDAQ:AMED) is not the least popular stock in this group but hedge fund interest is still below average. Our overall hedge fund sentiment score for AMED is 44.6. Stocks with higher number of hedge fund positions relative to other stocks as well as relative to their historical range receive a higher sentiment score. This is a slightly negative signal and we’d rather spend our time researching stocks that hedge funds are piling on. Our calculations showed that top 5 most popular stocks among hedge funds returned 95.8% in 2019 and 2020, and outperformed the S&P 500 ETF (SPY) by 40 percentage points. These stocks gained 24% in 2021 through July 9th and surpassed the market again by 6.7 percentage points. Unfortunately AMED wasn’t nearly as popular as these 5 stocks (hedge fund sentiment was quite bearish); AMED investors were disappointed as the stock returned 1.9% since the end of March (through 7/9) and underperformed the market. If you are interested in investing in large cap stocks with huge upside potential, you should check out the top 5 most popular stocks among hedge funds as most of these stocks already outperformed the market in 2021.
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Disclosure: None. This article was originally published at Insider Monkey.
