Hedge Funds Have Never Been More Bullish On HBT Financial, Inc. (HBT)

Is HBT Financial, Inc. (NASDAQ:HBT) a good place to invest some of your money right now? We can gain invaluable insight to help us answer that question by studying the investment trends of top investors, who employ world-class Ivy League graduates, who are given immense resources and industry contacts to put their financial expertise to work. The top picks of these firms have historically outperformed the market when we account for known risk factors, making them very valuable investment ideas.

Is HBT Financial, Inc. (NASDAQ:HBT) a buy, sell, or hold? The best stock pickers were buying. The number of long hedge fund bets inched up by 1 recently. HBT Financial, Inc. (NASDAQ:HBT) was in 10 hedge funds’ portfolios at the end of the second quarter of 2021. The all time high for this statistic is 10. This means the bullish number of hedge fund positions in this stock currently sits at its all time high. Our calculations also showed that HBT isn’t among the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds (click for Q2 rankings). There were 9 hedge funds in our database with HBT positions at the end of the first quarter.

Why do we pay any attention at all to hedge fund sentiment? Our research has shown that a select group of hedge fund holdings outperformed the S&P 500 ETFs by 79 percentage points since March 2017 (see the details here). That’s why we believe hedge fund sentiment is an extremely useful indicator that investors should pay attention to.

Matthew Lindenbaum of Basswood Capital

At Insider Monkey, we scour multiple sources to uncover the next great investment idea. For example, lithium mining is one of the fastest growing industries right now, so we are checking out stock pitches like this emerging lithium stock. We go through lists like the 10 best EV stocks to pick the next Tesla that will deliver a 10x return. Even though we recommend positions in only a tiny fraction of the companies we analyze, we check out as many stocks as we can. We read hedge fund investor letters and listen to stock pitches at hedge fund conferences. You can subscribe to our free daily newsletter on our homepage. With all of this in mind we’re going to check out the new hedge fund action encompassing HBT Financial, Inc. (NASDAQ:HBT).

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

At second quarter’s end, a total of 10 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were bullish on this stock, a change of 11% from the first quarter of 2020. By comparison, 6 hedge funds held shares or bullish call options in HBT a year ago. So, let’s review which hedge funds were among the top holders of the stock and which hedge funds were making big moves.

More specifically, Royce & Associates was the largest shareholder of HBT Financial, Inc. (NASDAQ:HBT), with a stake worth $14.2 million reported as of the end of June. Trailing Royce & Associates was Adage Capital Management, which amassed a stake valued at $7.6 million. Basswood Capital, Renaissance Technologies, and D E Shaw 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 Zebra Capital Management allocated the biggest weight to HBT Financial, Inc. (NASDAQ:HBT), around 0.34% of its 13F portfolio. Royce & Associates is also relatively very bullish on the stock, designating 0.1 percent of its 13F equity portfolio to HBT.

As one would reasonably expect, key money managers have jumped into HBT Financial, Inc. (NASDAQ:HBT) headfirst. Basswood Capital, managed by Matthew Lindenbaum, initiated the most outsized position in HBT Financial, Inc. (NASDAQ:HBT). Basswood Capital had $1.8 million invested in the company at the end of the quarter.

Let’s now take a look at hedge fund activity in other stocks similar to HBT Financial, Inc. (NASDAQ:HBT). These stocks are BlueLinx Holdings Inc. (NYSE:BXC), WiMi Hologram Cloud Inc. (NASDAQ:WIMI), Magenta Therapeutics, Inc. (NASDAQ:MGTA), Financial Institutions, Inc. (NASDAQ:FISI), Nanobiotix S.A. (NASDAQ:NBTX), Crawford & Company (NYSE:CRD), and RBB Bancorp (NASDAQ:RBB). All of these stocks’ market caps match HBT’s market cap.

View table here if you experience formatting issues.

As you can see these stocks had an average of 10.6 hedge funds with bullish positions and the average amount invested in these stocks was $54 million. That figure was $27 million in HBT’s case. Magenta Therapeutics, Inc. (NASDAQ:MGTA) is the most popular stock in this table. On the other hand Nanobiotix S.A. (NASDAQ:NBTX) is the least popular one with only 5 bullish hedge fund positions. HBT Financial, Inc. (NASDAQ:HBT) is not the least popular stock in this group but hedge fund interest is still below average. Our overall hedge fund sentiment score for HBT is 55.2. 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 25.7% in 2021 through September 27th and surpassed the market again by 6.2 percentage points. Unfortunately HBT wasn’t nearly as popular as these 5 stocks (hedge fund sentiment was quite bearish); HBT investors were disappointed as the stock returned -8.7% since the end of June (through 9/27) 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.

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