Hedge Funds Are Selling Crown Holdings, Inc. (CCK)

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 Crown Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:CCK) based on that data.

Crown Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:CCK) shareholders have witnessed a decrease in support from the world’s most elite money managers lately. Crown Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:CCK) was in 60 hedge funds’ portfolios at the end of the first quarter of 2021. The all time high for this statistic is 63. There were 63 hedge funds in our database with CCK positions at the end of the fourth quarter. Our calculations also showed that CCK isn’t among the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds (click for Q1 rankings).

Hedge funds’ reputation as shrewd investors has been tarnished in the last decade as their hedged returns couldn’t keep up with the unhedged returns of the market indices. Hedge funds have more than $3.5 trillion in assets under management, so you can’t expect their entire portfolios to beat the market by large margins. Our research was able to identify in advance a select group of hedge fund holdings that outperformed the S&P 500 ETFs by more than 115 percentage points since March 2017 (see the details here). So you can still find a lot of gems by following hedge funds’ moves today.

Lee Ainslie of Maverick Capital

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Do Hedge Funds Think CCK Is A Good Stock To Buy Now?

At the end of the first quarter, a total of 60 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey held long positions in this stock, a change of -5% from one quarter earlier. Below, you can check out the change in hedge fund sentiment towards CCK over the last 23 quarters. With hedgies’ positions undergoing their usual ebb and flow, there exists a few noteworthy hedge fund managers who were boosting their stakes significantly (or already accumulated large positions).

Among these funds, Lyrical Asset Management held the most valuable stake in Crown Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:CCK), which was worth $336.2 million at the end of the fourth quarter. On the second spot was Southpoint Capital Advisors which amassed $145.6 million worth of shares. D E Shaw, Maverick Capital, and Citadel Investment Group were also very fond of the stock, becoming one of the largest hedge fund holders of the company. In terms of the portfolio weights assigned to each position SAYA Management allocated the biggest weight to Crown Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:CCK), around 16.94% of its 13F portfolio. Engle Capital is also relatively very bullish on the stock, earmarking 13.45 percent of its 13F equity portfolio to CCK.

Seeing as Crown Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:CCK) has experienced falling interest from the aggregate hedge fund industry, it’s easy to see that there was a specific group of hedge funds that decided to sell off their positions entirely in the first quarter. Interestingly, Barry Lebovits and Joshua Kuntz’s Rivulet Capital cut the largest position of all the hedgies followed by Insider Monkey, totaling about $108.1 million in stock, and David Einhorn’s Greenlight Capital was right behind this move, as the fund cut about $21.2 million worth. These bearish behaviors are intriguing to say the least, as total hedge fund interest fell by 3 funds in the first quarter.

Let’s now review hedge fund activity in other stocks similar to Crown Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:CCK). We will take a look at Oak Street Health, Inc. (NYSE:OSH), The Carlyle Group Inc (NASDAQ:CG), UDR, Inc. (NYSE:UDR), Open Text Corporation (NASDAQ:OTEX), Icahn Enterprises LP (NASDAQ:IEP), Brown & Brown, Inc. (NYSE:BRO), and Enel Americas S.A. (NYSE:ENIA). This group of stocks’ market caps are closest to CCK’s market cap.

View table here if you experience formatting issues.

As you can see these stocks had an average of 20.4 hedge funds with bullish positions and the average amount invested in these stocks was $2089 million. That figure was $2028 million in CCK’s case. Oak Street Health, Inc. (NYSE:OSH) is the most popular stock in this table. On the other hand Icahn Enterprises LP (NASDAQ:IEP) is the least popular one with only 4 bullish hedge fund positions. Compared to these stocks Crown Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:CCK) is more popular among hedge funds. Our overall hedge fund sentiment score for CCK is 80.6. 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. 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 17.2% in 2021 through June 11th and still beat the market by 3.3 percentage points. Unfortunately CCK wasn’t nearly as popular as these 5 stocks and hedge funds that were betting on CCK were disappointed as the stock returned 4.6% since the end of the first quarter (through 6/11) 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 since 2019.

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