Hedge Funds Aren’t Crazy About TeleTech Holdings, Inc. (TTEC) Anymore

It seems that the masses and most of the financial media hate hedge funds and what they do, but why is this hatred of hedge funds so prominent? At the end of the day, these asset management firms do not gamble the hard-earned money of the people who are on the edge of poverty. Truth be told, most hedge fund managers and other smaller players within this industry are very smart and skilled investors. Of course, they may also make wrong bets in some instances, but no one knows what the future holds and how market participants will react to the bountiful news that floods in each day. The S&P 500 Index gained 7.6% in the 12 month-period that ended November 21, while less than 49% of its stocks beat the benchmark. In contrast, the 30 most popular mid-cap stocks among the top hedge fund investors tracked by the Insider Monkey team returned 18% over the same period, which provides evidence that these money managers do have great stock picking abilities. That’s why we believe it isn’t a waste of time to check out hedge fund sentiment before you invest in a stock like TeleTech Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ:TTEC) .

TeleTech Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ:TTEC) investors should be aware of a decrease in hedge fund interest lately. There were 8 hedge funds in our database with TTEC holdings at the end of September. 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 Fidelity & Guaranty Life (NYSE:FGL), The St. Joe Company (NYSE:JOE), and Group 1 Automotive, Inc. (NYSE:GPI) to gather more data points.

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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Keeping this in mind, let’s take a look at the latest action surrounding TeleTech Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ:TTEC).

What does the smart money think about TeleTech Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ:TTEC)?

At the end of the third quarter, a total of 8 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey held long positions in this stock, a drop of 11% from one quarter earlier. Below, you can check out the change in hedge fund sentiment towards TTEC over the last 5 quarters. With the smart money’s capital changing hands, there exists a few notable hedge fund managers who were increasing their holdings considerably (or already accumulated large positions).

According to publicly available hedge fund and institutional investor holdings data compiled by Insider Monkey, Renaissance Technologies, one of the largest hedge funds in the world, has the biggest position in TeleTech Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ:TTEC), worth close to $7.6 million, accounting for less than 0.1% of its total 13F portfolio. The second largest stake is held by Citadel Investment Group, led by Ken Griffin, which holds a $2.8 million position; the fund has less than 0.1% of its 13F portfolio invested in the stock. Other peers that hold long positions comprise Cliff Asness’ AQR Capital Management, Joshua Nash’s Ulysses Management and D. E. Shaw’s D E Shaw. We should note that Ulysses Management is 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.