Hedge Funds Are Selling Medtronic PLC (MDT)

A whopping number of 13F filings filed with U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has been processed by Insider Monkey so that individual investors can look at the overall hedge fund sentiment towards the stocks included in their watchlists. These freshly-submitted public filings disclose money managers’ equity positions as of the end of the three-month period that ended September 30, so let’s proceed with the discussion of the hedge fund sentiment on Medtronic PLC (NYSE:MDT).

Medtronic PLC (NYSE:MDT) investors should be aware of a decrease in enthusiasm from smart money of late. At the end of this article we will also compare MDT to other stocks including Intel Corporation (NASDAQ:INTC), Toyota Motor Corporation (ADR) (NYSE:TM), and PepsiCo, Inc. (NYSE:PEP) to get a better sense of its popularity.

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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With all of this in mind, we’re going to take a peek at the recent action regarding Medtronic PLC (NYSE:MDT).

What have hedge funds been doing with Medtronic PLC (NYSE:MDT)?

Heading into the fourth quarter of 2016, a total of 43 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey held long positions in this stock, a drop of 14% from the previous quarter. With the smart money’s positions undergoing their usual ebb and flow, there exists a select group of noteworthy hedge fund managers who were upping their holdings meaningfully (or already accumulated large positions).

Of the funds tracked by Insider Monkey, Arrowstreet Capital, managed by Peter Rathjens, Bruce Clarke and John Campbell, holds the biggest position in Medtronic PLC (NYSE:MDT). Arrowstreet Capital has a $219.7 million position in the stock, comprising 0.7% of its 13F portfolio. The second most bullish fund manager is Ric Dillon of Diamond Hill Capital, with a $206.1 million position; 1.3% of its 13F portfolio is allocated to the company. Other peers that are bullish consist of Phill Gross and Robert Atchinson’s Adage Capital Management, Brian Ashford-Russell and Tim Woolley’s Polar Capital and Paul Marshall and Ian Wace’s Marshall Wace LLP.